Italian Peasant with Japanese Name

Festive Attyre is being a huge enabler with me. In this case, I decided that I wanted to make a late Italian Renaissance peasant outfit for Kozu. The designs ended up based off of two women from Pietro Ronzelli's Nativia di Maria. As per usual, as much as possible would come out of my stash.

The wig is very much not from my stash, and neither is the ribbon. I didn't have any ribbon of the right size that would look good for a lower class ensemble.

The main feature is the kirtle and sleeves, particularly the trim. I didn't deliberately go after the black and red color scheme, but that was the material I had that had good weight and drape, and that yarn looked good against it. The trim is made from lines of single crochet from a cone of yarn older than I am, and is hand applied. Except for the long skirt seams, this thing is hand sewn. The sleeves are separate and are mostly machine sewn.

Under the kirtle is the smock. Since I was short on linen scraps and the sleeves are tight, I just made short smock sleeves so I wouldn't have to worry about stuffing them in. At first I miscalculated how much of the ruffle I needed, so I had to partially dismantle it and piece in some more material. I was pretty much out of linen scraps type 1, so I went with type 2 for the last bit of length. Yay, mismatched peasant! Mostly handsewn except for part of the ruffle.

The apron is made of pieces of material left over from making a human sized apron. There wasn't enough from the big scraps to make the third panel, so I pieced it together for more budget saving peasant goodness. At this point, I no longer wanted to handsew, so the long sides of the panels and the piecing are all done on machine, though I used the blind stitch feature on the machine for hemming. The short sides are hand hemmed, but I took my dear time finishing that.

Here's a detail:

Weirdly, though I didn't want to hand sew this part, I jumped at the chance to connect the three pieces of apron with insertion stitching like the woman in the painting in a pink dress. I guess my brain decided that embroidery is not at all like construction sewing.

So this is the outfit from top to bottom. it took a lot longer than it should have due to project hopping, but I'm very satisfied with how it turned out.

Make It Black

One of the swaps I participated in was called the Black Swap, which naturally had to do with black items. My partner did not have anything specific in mind, and her doll was described as being feminine with the occasional fondness for surprising others. In addition to black, she wanted light pink to serve as a complimentary color.

Here are in progress photos of the embroidery.

Here is Dalya, kind enough to model the cape:

La, La, Dalya

In September 2011 my mother and I went to Japan. There were many places we wanted to see, things we wanted to try, and gardens to admire. We decided in advance how to cope with only one of us knowing the language, and how to prevent translation headaches. Of the places we put on our itinerary, Kyoto and Volks' Tenshi no Sato were included.

Due to my strong penchant for giving myself thought exercises I took a look at some of the MSDs available at Sato courtesy of some fan sites, asking myself what doll I would get if the chance presented itself. None of the regular molds caught my fancy, and the MSD sized Tenshi doll really didn't grab my fancy.

Still I played along with myself. If I got a new girl, she would be a sister to Rica and Lilja, as I was bringing them along. Miss Hypothetical would be the middle sister. As there is not much of an age gap between these two sisters, I would prefer it if the new girl served as Lilja's older twin. No matter what Miss Hypothetical's default hair and eyes were, I'd switch them out to coordinate with Rica and Lilja.

At Sato there was much browsing and photo taking, some disappointments and considerable laughs, and shopping to be had. The angel looked much nicer in person that it did in the promotional photos. After much careful deliberation, we got her. 

Once we got back to our room I let out the new girl, dressed her, and plopped a red wig on her head.



A couple of years ago, I bought Lilja a silvery human sized ring that looks like flowers joined together.  It tends to get buried under the avalanche of other rings Lilja wears as bracelets. For the new girl, I took it off of the little sister and put it on her wrist. It was like magic, there was now cohesion between the twins, like I planned it all along.



I named her Dalya in honor of the X Japan album and the Angela Aki song, of which the title of this post is a reference. These two pieces of music are actually spelled "Dahlia," but I'm sticking with the alternate spelling on account of my fondness for the Silent Hill games, and a major villain is named Dahlia.

Oh Glorious Day

I have a soft spot for pintucks, especially in white fabric. I would like to blame this on blastmilk and her pretty photo shoots, and Volks, for having so many dolls have default outfits of this kind. As it happens, Yu Wei and Yu Lian look good in white, so I made them some outfits based on Volks designs, but with my own stamp.

Casual Trio

Here is a sample of some less elaborate things I make for my girls. Some of these pieces I even finished in a timely fashion!

The skirt Mariko is wearing was my first attempt at making the spiral ribbed skirt for Calla and Nurit. I made some error in the instructions, as the waist ended up much too small for the bigger girls. Up top she is wearing the Sleeves a Go Go (second pattern from the top) pattern made for Blythe that looks good on her.

Nurit has a blouse made from a 1930s Bleuette pattern. The ruffle really makes the shirt, doesn't it? The skirt is from a scrap of cloth I had since grade school. There wasn't much of it left, but with careful cutting it made a respectable skirt.

Calla's dress was one of the first three dresses I made for Yu Wei, before she arrived. I was going through some of Yu Wei and Yu Lian's older things and decided that I wasn't thrilled with the construction of the dress. Calla was fairly new to my group at the time, so I concluded that it would be best to cut down the bodice and turn it it into a summery tiny dress.

The shirt she has on over the dress was made during a time I worried that she and Nurit has more skirts than tops. Few bjds wear shortgowns which are really simple to made and was something I could take with me where ever. I got horribly distracted (again,) so it took me a while to finish the pleats, but this top has served us well.

Nurit's Skivvies

Nurit is almost, but not quite, Calla's size. This is not enough for me to justify making clothes that fit only her, but Yo sized things might end up swimming on her. My solution was to make her bulky underwear, courtesy of The Bleu Door.

I'm not showing layer one in all its glory as I'm a bit embarrassed about it. It's an undershirt and shorts joined into one that I thought I adapted to her size, but it was too short, making the shoulder straps dig into her joints, forcing her arms out of its sockets. I put up with it for a while, but I ended up taking it apart and letting out the shoulder and crotch seams. It fits her now, but the straps look longer than I'd like.

Here's the original embroidered leaf I did for it:

Some time later, saw a simple slip pattern with adorable embroidery and I came to the conclusion that the dresses and such were still a bit too big, and she could do with another layer. While I was at it, I would decorate the first layer to be prettier and coordinate with the slip:

Fake Fur Fun

Despite my many distractions, I'm still forging ahead with my Renaissance projects. A recent diversion was this pretty little link. Courtesy of Jen Thompson, I heard of these furs before, and know I wanted to try my hand at making one of the more ornate versions for myself. Cue a trip to the store where I spent too much on pretty gold beads and Sculpy, several tizzies looking for portraits featuring zibellinos for research and accuracy purposes, and fun with crochet.

Crocheting the critter was easy and relaxing, except when I had to pull out rows. Eyelash yarn likes to tangle with itself. Despite careful yet haphazard measuring, I was not pleased with the size of the first critter. I wanted something my girl could hold in her arm, and I created a lap blanket. As I still had enough yarn left, I made a smaller one. I also got some gold Sculpy. Initially I wanted to make a pretty white head and paw beads like in the first link, but the clay picked up a frightful amount of black lint.

Both heads started as triangles of foil covered in clay with features sculpted in. The eyes were pressed in with the help of a bead, and I embedded jump rings into the bottoms so I could later attach them to the zibellinos. the patterns on the paw beads were initially going to be historically accurate, but after a bad tizzy I decided it was simpler just to use my own design. These also have jump rings in the bottom. More beads were added on as claws, and the whole thing was fastened on to a new belt.

While it's not perfect, I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out.

 Here Kozu models her pelt, in a purchased outfit that makes the gold of the piece stand out all the more.