Tag Archives: Talyssa

Welcome Gracie!

Months ago I preordered my first 18″ MSD Kaye Wiggs doll from Jpop Dolls. Gracie was a new sculpt of Kaye’s and her beautiful face stole my heart. She was available in two resin colors: natural and sunkissed, three body sizes: 17″ (Talyssa, Mei Mei), 18″, and Toby size. I chose the sunkissed resin on the 18″ body.

I decided on the sunkissed resin because, for me, it is easier to photograph and looks great with everything. My Millie is sunkissed and Talyssa is natural resin, so I’ve had a chance to compare the two. Kaye’s sunkissed color is actually the same value as a Little Darling, so it is not dark at all. If you’d like to see both you can view my slideshow for each doll on my website. Here is Millie and here is Talyssa’s slideshow (you can click on the slideshow photos to see more of that particular ensemble if you’d like). What do you think?

Gracie arrived last Friday! I didn’t have any clothes for her to wear, but that didn’t stop me from taking some photos of her with her new “sister”, Talyssa. Please excuse the nude shots. I thought it was okay because they are dolls after all. (lol) Gracie and Talyssa became fast friends, just like Gina and Lucy, my Little Darlings, did last November. You can see Lucy’s welcome photos here.

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I was so happy to receive brown eyes for Gracie, my first! I put Talyssa in her natural (the color she arrived in) eye color. Both girls wear 8″-9″ sized wigs and 15mm(Eyeco platinum)-16mm eyes, so can share. I’m hoping they can share clothes as well. I am currently making an ensemble using Talyssa’s patterns, so we will see if any adjustments are needed.

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Gracie and Talyssa are both standing for these photos, so you can see the slight height difference. Their resin colors are very close in value.

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For those of you interested in preordering Penny who is now available in tan, but aren’t sure about the tan resin, here is what I found out about the tan resin from Jpop Dolls. Kaye’s sunkissed resin color is only used for her dolls; tan Penny is a little darker and not as warm in hue. If you know the old Sasha dolls (sorry, I don’t) tan Penny is lighter than those. They mentioned that this tan resin is not dark at all compared to other tans that they use.

Hope your week is off to a great start! Are you as AMAZED as I am that this is the last week of February? Spring is right around the corner! Yay!

Bye for now, reader friends.

Portraits of Talyssa

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We had such a gloomy and wet day here. I didn’t know it would turn out to be such a great day for some natural light photos. Talyssa was the doll that I happened to pick up. I thought that I’d share them with you.

There are quite a few windows in this room, but since it is a rather large room the only near light was coming from the window on my right side; I was about 12″ away. To slightly blur the background and keep her face in focus I used an f/stop of 4, ISO of 400. It was almost too dark in the room to take these without a tripod because the little red “shaky camera” icon would sometimes appear (depending on what I focused on, light or dark).

I can’t believe how different she looks in this natural light!

Thanks for stopping by!

Live and Learn When Things Go Wrong

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What do you do when you are working on something, putting your heart into what you are making, and then, something goes wrong?

I was really sad and oh, so disappointed. The hours I spent knitting and embroidering this sweater flashed through my mind as I looked at the stains that a new strand of beads had left behind around the buttonholes. I tried dabbing the worst stain out with water, then tried a tiny bit of Shout, the one stain didn’t budge, so I didn’t even try with the others.

Well, how bad are the stains? Not too bad, in my opinion, but the sweater is not perfect now. 😞 I know that I don’t have it in me to remake this sweater and the stains are very faint, so the sweater isn’t ruined. I removed the offending beads and replaced them with glass beads. If the sweater is buttoned, the stains are totally covered up. And, (ha ha) unbuttoned in a darkened room they are unnoticeable. Hey, I gotta laugh or I’d cry!

But seriously, see not too bad.

Here is the sweater with the new glass beads sewn on and the sweater buttoned up.

And, here is Talyssa during the photo shoot when everything was going perfectly, or so I thought. I liked Gina’s “Ivy and Holly” ensemble so much that I decided to make Talyssa one of her own.

Now, for the learning part and in case you were wondering about these beads. These beads were labeled as “Dyed Bamboo Coral”. I wanted to better understand how this happened and how I could test beads , so I took the strand and rubbed it on an old wool sweater and sure enough there was a faint pink stain left on the wool. Needless to say, I will be staying away from dyed beads.