I threaded the ankle strap through backwards, but didn’t realize this until I was editing the photos, this is why the buckle is facing inwards in this shot.

 
Here is the big step that took me a long time to get up the nerve to do: wipe the face off my $120 Poppy Parker without actually knowing if my repaint attempt would turn out acceptable, or if my hands would shake, my paint would blob up and I’d end up hurling Poppy’s head at the bin. Rest assured though, had the latter happened, I would not have blogged about it. The fact that you’re reading this means things turned out OK

 
Fortunately, once I got started, I found that my hands were not shaky, and that I had a clear favorite among the brushes I bought: The Princeton Select 10/0 Short Liner from A.C. Moore. I’ll be getting more of these brushes for sure, they are wonderfully pointed, stiff and easy use like writing with a fine pen.

 
I did the eyewhites first (with very light grey), and dark red on the lips. By the time I took this first step photo, I had done the eyebrows as well, with a brown primarily of raw umber. When the lips dried, I added lighter shade vertical strokes for lip creases, and darker brown hair lines to the eyebrows:

 
Here I’ve added eyeliner (black) and dark blue base for the irises. As you can see from the underside of her eyes, the 10/0 liner can do very fine, nice lines.

 
On sunday, I set to work adding color to Poppy’s eyes about every two hours. I built up her irises from increasingly like shades of blue (mix of ultramarine, emerald green and TiO2 white). Then I did the black pupil dots and eyelashes, then finally the white specular highlights in the eyes. Of all the work, the eyelashes are what I’m least happy with. I need to find a 20/0 or 18/0 brush (or smaller) that is as good as my 10/0. The one I used was a La Corneille, which which was too soft bristled.

 
Here Poppy’s head is sitting for overnight drying of her varnish (gloss on the lips and eyes, matte everywhere else):

 
And that is how she turned out! Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised. I showed absolutely no knack for painting on 2D canvases, and did not really have high hopes for my attempt to repaint a tiny doll head freehand. But I’m happy with how she looks, and excited to do the next one even better! I have much to learn to make repaints like the ones I’ve really admired from Park and Jon Copeland in particular. I need to learn to use transparency, and how to thin for brush-stroke-free fills. I’ve ordered a 2.5X magnifying visor to help with doing the iris details, I’m told this really helps.

Below, Poppy is wearing the latest pair I made just for her, the final construction steps of which are the subject of this blog entry. The shoe is built around a custom-molded polyurethane wedge sole, the creation process for which is documented in an earlier entry: Misaki Wedge Soles. This blog entry will focus on the steps that happen after the plastic casting, to create the finished product:

This first photo shows how I secure the thong portion of most of my thong style sandals. I first drill a hole all the way through the sole that is the right size to pass through the cord, which is typically 0.7mm elastic bead cord but in this case is 10-pound hemp cord. Then, I counterbore the underside with a larger drill bit, so that the knotted end of the cord will fit snuggly in the recess without pulling through:

Here you can see how I pulled the cord tight from the top, and the knot fits into the recessed hole:

The next step for this shoe was to mark where I intend the top straps to go. The top straps I made from braiding 3 different shades of brown 10-pound hemp cord into a flat braid. These marks, made with Sharpie, are my guides for where to cut recesses for the straps with my Dremel tool:

Then I Dremel the grooves for the straps. The point of the grooves is so that when I wrap the sole with leather, the ends of the straps don’t make ugly bumps visible through the suede.

In this next photo, I’m holding the straps in place around Poppy’s foot, to mark the position of the straps:

Then I glued the top strap into the carved channels:

Here the strap glue is drying, and I’ve trimmed away excess braid:

Now the fun part, wrapping in suede. I applied a thin coat of E-6000 industrial craft adhesive to the suede and the sole, waited a couple of minutes for the glue to pre-set, then wrapped the leather around the sold and trimmed off the overlapping ends:

After the glue set, I trimmed the excess with a new scalpel. This step requires the sharpness of the scalpel to get a super clean cut–an X-Acto would be a poor substitute here, though a single-edged razor blade would work OK in place of the scalpel. Cutting is done with each stroke pushing towards the center of the shoe, so that the leather is pushed against the sole during the cut, not torn away from it.

When I got to this point, I realized that what I really wanted for the thong cord was a loop that goes up through the sole and around the top strap. I used my small drill bit like a file to enlarge the small portion of the hole to accommodate two ends of the cord side by side. Once threaded through, I knotted them underneath while Poppy’s foot was in place, to get a tight fit. I used a small dab of rubberized Super Glue Ultra Gel Control to secure the knot in the hole. When the glue dried, I scalpeled it flush to the bottom of the sole.

Here is the finished product:

What I found is that this particular craft suits me just fine. After making some swatches in fat yarn first, and learning what the loops and stitches look like, I had no difficulty working at the size 10 thread scale. My first project was to try making my own Misaki bikini, and it turned out OK, though the top is a bit wide for her bust.

Emily’s bikini is made from #10 Cébélia crochet thread, worked with a Clover No. 2 (1.5mm) hook.

After making that, I gave half-double crochet a shot, and made Alice a halter top:

Next up: smaller thread. I’m experimenting today with DMC Pearl #12 and a 1.25mm hook, to see if I can make something less bulky and more toit.

Here is my second sewing attempt, the same shirt from the Doll Coordinate Recipe beginner book, but this time from a 96% Cotton, 4% Spandex two-way stretch knit. I still need to select and add a closure. I think the next one I make will be altered slightly too, I’d like it to be a little more form fitting and not so wide at the shoulders:

Lacy holds the first draft in her hand:

I tried to start with the simplest pattern in the Doll Coordinate Recipe beginner’s book, which is a simple jersey tank top. The first thing that happened was that the machine punched the edge of my garment right down into the bobbin area, because I was sewing so close to the edge of the stretchy material. Secondly, I found I could not turn the material to sew a curve; the feed dogs won that battle, and my attempts to reorient the piece only resulted in stretching and distortion.

Here, I backed up a bit, and decided to try the pattern with 100% cotton muslin. The end result was, well, not a complete disaster, but not a haute couture garment either :-/ My curved seams have messy directional corrections, and some of the hem tabs weren’t folded over enough. I definitely learned a few things though, like the fact that I need a metal plate in the machine with a smaller needle hole in it, and I need some little pusher tools to guide the fabric through the machine. I need to be more precise in folding over my hems as well. Here’s Lacy Modernist wearing the results:

Here you can see the not-so-perfect stitching and the fact that I haven’t added a closure yet:

These are the pattern pieces I copied out of the DCR mook:

Here’s my cut-out fabric before I began sewing it:

The first think I do is make some rough “blanks” from Super Sculpey FIRM. I form the basic wedge shape, and press Misaki’s feet into them to make impressions. Pressing the feet into the Sculpey insures that the foot bed will properly conform to the foot after all the filing and shaping has been done to the baked part.

Here is my trick for making symmetrical pairs: I use a TINY amount of Krazy Glue to attach the blanks together at the soles. All profile carving will be done to both blanks at the same time.

Here you can see that I’ve been filing the conjoined blanks:

The result of my little trick is a closely matched left-right pair when the two blanks are separated:

As you can see in the above photo, when I carved the footbed area of the blanks, I deliberately left untouched spots where Misaki’s heels and balls of her feet impressed the Sculpey. Leaving these small depressions helps the final shoe to stay correctly positioned on the foot. Her feet naturally align themselves with the divots.

I’m leaving these soles with a bit of platform to them, so that a variety of shoe styles can be made from them. I won’t be using the resulting mold to produce only platform shoes, but it’s much easier to file castings down than it is to build them up. I will probably file away the platforms on a pair of castings and use them to make another lower-profile mold.

Satisfied with the symmetry of my carvings, I polish the shoe masters with a 3-way nail buffer, and set them up on Klean Klay for producing a silicone mold. The process of silicone mold-making is shown in greater detail in my previous blog entries.

Here is the finished mold:

The first castings in Smooth Cast ONYX fit perfectly. These wedge soles are now ready for uppers–the creation of which will be shown in a future post.

End.

In my last entry, I showed how I made a master model of a Momoko shoe from Super Sculpey. In this post, I will show the steps I use to make RTV silicone molds for casting the final product in polyurethane. This particular shoe project actually had two mold-making steps because my master Sculpey shoe was not left/right-specific. I first made a mold to reproduce the Sculpey shoe in urethane, then I carved two of the first-generation urethane castings to be a left and right pair. This pair then became the left and right masters for the final pair mold.

Shown below is a cutaway of the mold I used to make a direct copy of the Sculpey shoe from the previous entry. I made a dozen or so castings, then sacrificed the mold in the name of science , dissecting it with a scalpel. The mold I’m going to show in the making is just like this one, only it produces a left and right pair of shoes rather than just one.

Here on the left is a pair of shoes I made from the mold above, which are made lefts and rights only by the buckle placement–the shoes are otherwise identical and symmetrical. In the middle is the pair of castings that I have further carved (subtly) into a left and right handed pair. I shaped the toe section and arches. At the far right is a clear casting from the single-shoe mold that I consulted while carving the black pair, so that I would know where it was safe to remove material from. The black left and right pair are the master models for the final mold.

Here is a close-up of the clear reference shoe. You can see that there is a lot of material in the foot-bed area, because the momoko foot does not have bent toes or the normal proportions of a human foot.

Here is a side view of the prototype pair (left) and the left-right pair (right). The heels on the right pair look mismatched in thickness, but this is a camera perspective trick, I actually spent hours with my Mitutoyo digital calipers getting the shoes to be near-exact mirror images.

Here is the first step of the clay “layup”. I filled the arch spaces with Klean Klay, and placed them on the slab:

Next, I’m bisecting the slab to make it easier to carve details around each shoe:

First, I go all around the part line with this ball-end Sculpey tool, to that my part line for the 2-piece mold ends up on the bottom edge of the shoe. I’m slightly undercutting the model, so that the flash is actually on the very edge (easiest to trim off from there).

I like a clean mold, so I cut away displaced clay from the previous step:

One side done:

Both sides laid-up:

I then rejoined the slab on top of a lego plate piece, the bumps of which help to tie the clay halves together. I smoothed the seam. Also in this photo, you can see where I have super-glued on the wires that will form the air vents (risers), and I’ve placed the curved eye droppers that will form the pour holes (sprues):

Side view:

Next, the lego brick walls go up, to hold in the silicone, and the inside of the cavity gets a light coating of Mann 200 mold release:

Then, I mix up the Sorta-Clear 18 platinum silicone. I’m using Smooth-On’s Plat Cat catalyst also, to speed up curing time. I cure the mold at 150°F also, reducing overall cure time from the normal 24 hours to just 2 hours. I’m not patient, OK?

Stir like a mad fiend:

Transfer to larger container, so that no unmixed components get into the final mold, and because the silicone needs expansion room for the vacuum degassing stage.

Here I’ve poured the silicone into the mold, slowly. I give it about 15 minutes for the bulk of the bubbles to rise to the surface:

Then, the still-liquid mold goes into the pressure tank. I cure my molds at the same pressure I use during the polyurethane casting, about 50-60 psi. The air pressure insures that my mold will have no bubbles whatsoever. A single bubble can ruin a mold, so this step is worthwhile if you already have this equipment for pressure casting:

This mold is under 50 psi.

2 hours later, the top half of the mold is cured to solid rubber. I usually put the mold in the freezer at this point, to make it easier to remove the clay in one piece.

Here, I pulled off the clay:

All the clay is removed from the bottom of the mold:

And the legos are built up again to receive the bottom piece pour. Here I give it another spray with Mann Ease Release 200, to prevent the new silicone bottom piece from adhering to the already-cured top piece. This is important, you do not want to forget the release agent when making a 2-part mold!

A few more hours, and the mold is complete!

It comes apart at the seam, because of the mold release agent between the parts:

Here, I’ve taken out the pins and eye droppers:

First pour:

Here is the result of my first pour of Smooth-Cast ONYX into the new mold. It leaked a little out the toe end, but only because I skimped on rubber bands in order to have a clear video camera shot while filling the mold:

The excess is no problem, it just comes off as wafer-thin flash:

Out come the sprues, which I detached from the shoes by squeezing the mold. I engineer the sprues with a pinched  spot to insure that they break off about 2mm from the part, so that I don’t end up with a chunk out of the part:

Now I have two pairs! Polished high-durometer polyurethane masters make very good molds–the newly cast parts come out of the mold almost as shiny and glossy as the polished masters. And this is without a silicone release agent, which would shine them up even more (though in my experience, that comes at the expense of mold longevity):

This concludes my mold tutorial.