Sadie's Living Dead Dollhouse, Part 2

Back to more work! 

Read part 1 here.

In the middle of all the façade and interior planning, I had worked on my next idea--every house needs wall art, particularly when it's haunted, and I figured I could print some LDD photos I'd taken to serve as portraits! I printed takes (all off a home inkjet printer) until the images fit right for the empty dollhouse frames I had. I used a portrait of S1 Sadie by her grave as the grand living room portrait to hang over the fireplace, suiting her as the little lady of the house. This was the original photo:

Then I edited it a bit to suit an older painting:

And here's the print, with gloss varnish and glued into the frame.

Here it is above the fireplace. I added a potted plant, and put S1 Sadie's flowers in a tankard to serve as a prop since the S1 doll was never using them. The tankard is heavy and wide enough at the base to keep the flowers from tipping it over, but I still put some putty inside to keep the flowers centered. I think they really suit the red and green combo of this room that was dictated by the fireplace.

After Sadie's portrait, I repeated this process with other oil-portrait-suitable compositions I'd taken of Holle Katrina and variant Isabel. I'm not necessarily trying to flex with the portrait subjects I choose, but to have such a rare doll as this Isabel deserves commemoration.

I also printed previous pictures of Agatha and Ember to fo fill out even more space, and Faith to honor my first LDD and hang in the bathroom. Agatha got put in my only oval frame, since an oval portrait was simply the most appropriate for her. She's technically Georgian-era, but Victorian is right around the corner from her time period. I also printed the silhouette triptych of Sadies--S1, Resurrection, Return. While I didn't think it was appropriate to fully depict any Sadie dolls not based on the Series 1 original or Mini (to do so would feel a bit too "multiverse" for the world of this house), I thought the silhouettes were a graceful way to pay tribute to my special collection of all three basic Sadie incarnations. I ultimately reprinted this latter piece larger, though, after finding it too small to hang where I wanted it. That'll show up later.

I felt no qualms about using full-size LDDs' portraits in a Mini's house. The Minis and large dolls are the same character designs, so why not use the better versions in the artwork? It also greatly expands my options to turn into portraits from my old photo pieces because many more dolls were never adapted as Minis.

I also made a portrait from a picture of Wicked Witch Walpurgis which suits the red/green living room, a portrait of Jennocide from her burned-side profile, and a larger portrait using a shot of Evangeline to fill a second large frame. I thought the frame would suit a big painting in the attic, Evangeline is a very scary atticky doll, and she was one of the dolls I'd photographed in a suitable full-body composition for such a portrait.

Since the portrait shows her in a domestic hallway full of broken frames and mirrors, I glued some mirror shards on the floor below the portrait like they're coming out of the painting in a surreal manner.

And as long as I'm printing my LDD art pieces to mini scale, why not include mixed media? I decided to bring in some other document types I'd designed as speculative pieces in the LDD universe and let them be those documents in miniature--the movie poster I made for Dahlia, the newspaper for Vincent Vaude, and one of the tea menus I designed for Series 23--Betsy's.

I was getting genuinely giddy seeing these hypothetical documents I designed digitally being turned into real props and set dressing. It was so cool! I loved bringing these pieces back as tributes to my history with LDD here. The newspaper is no more detailed than the original digital file, and all of the folded paper under the top is blank and glued into shape. 

I tried wrapping the Dahlia poster in plastic, but I realized I'd have to get some actual gloss paper to print on for ideal results. I had a few other things to gloss print too--a photograph of Alison Crux since I like her so much and I've characterized her as very metaphysically evasive and hard to snap a picture of, a picture of Eggzorcist since she was my second Series 1 doll and I think she'd count as a friend of Sadie's, a photo of Quack, a photo of Chloe, and the autograph poster I designed for Hollywood--I remembered hers was the only autograph I made out to a specific recipient, and that was Sadie. I also printed Gluttony and Butcher Boop photos to hang in the kitchen.

From other previous posts, I also printed Hollywood's movie poster, Betsy's tea menu, Madame's theater poster, a Gabriella poster, and Daisy Slae's 1990s graphic poster for decoration, with all of them working in matte paper. I really tried to keep from over-referencing any one LDD, but I figure Sadie's a big Hollywood fan if she got her autograph and attended her red-carpet dead debut (while still alive), so it made sense to emphasize her. I don't think Sadie is all too caught up in the celebrity feud I imagined would have taken place between Dahlia and Hollywood, but while she was able to appreciate Dahlia, she prefers Hollywood.

I added some pins as tiny nails in the wall, boring holes with a needle tool and hammering in the pins, all to interchangeably hang some of the portraits by the stairwell and on the partitions in the attic. I had more portraits than I needed, so letting them hang and swap realistically gave me more freedom with the display.

Not every picture in the house is detached because some were chosen for one space and one space only, but the ones which aren't site-specific can be shuffled around. I'll list which pieces are glued and which are hung on nails at the end of this project.

Most of the framed pieces were glued to the flat backs of the frames, but one frame worked differently, with metal prongs in the back that folded over a pane of glass and the image. To fill this, I decided to take a new faux-antique photograph of Macumba as if he was photographed as a person of interest in the 1800s, maybe as a traveling magician or spiritualist who became a famous figure in the United States of the time.

I wanted to include and acknowledge Macumba because he's so unfairly alone as the sole Black doll within the brand, but he also felt like an attic portrait just because his representation as it stands is so difficult to celebrate and one doesn't really know what to do with him as he was made. LDD is its shortcomings and discomfort as much as it is its creativity and fun, and to acknowledge Macumba is also to acknowledge that he's a very awkward presence.

I think the antique framed-photo look is perfect with the image, glass, and exterior combined.

Because this frame doesn't have a proper flat back surface to glue a string to to hang it, I instead hung the top flair of the frame on the nail through a hole in the metalwork. Macumba and Agatha are both intended to hang in the attic, but they're not stuck to their walls like other portraits selected for a specific place.

Floating around again,  I added a chalk outline of a generic LDD Minis-style figure on the porch, which was completely eyeballed and freehand. The chalk is actually white colored pencil, which had the same visual effect as chalk and offered me the necessary fineness of line.

I got the pink paint I needed and worked on Sadie's room. The paint was streaky and inconsistent in tone even after multiple coats, so I decided to try a trick I'd heard about and mixed in some cornstarch to thicken the paint. This definitely helped reduce the time to get an even color, though I still needed to go over a couple of areas repeatedly. Sadie's room, with the pink, black, and white colors, started to remind me of the art style of the original Eloise book, which I adore, and that led me to consider the illustrations for some inspiration touches...and to make a drawing of Sadie as if drawn by Hilary Knight for Eloise. This has nothing to do with the dollhouse, and was not incorporated into it, but I couldn't stop myself from doing it!

Opening page of Kay Thompson's Eloise, illustrated by Hilary Knight.

The art was practically made to be altered and parodied with Sadie, since I didn't have to change a bit of the pose or scenery in order to include all three of Sadie's classic accessories. Eloise's hands easily held the purse and knife, and the vase was there for her black roses. I changed the hall table she's leaning on to a fireplace, and I added the X scar to the forehead for a bit more detail. The signature on the wall is based on Eloise's own in her bedroom, which is iconic enough imagery in the book that I wanted it here, and I gave the text a drippy blood touch, as well as the lower edge of the scenery on the floor. This was all traced and modified by hand with pen ink (red and black), while the powder-pink color was achieved with thick colored pencil that was then erased with as much strength as I could get so the color would be sufficiently pale and consistent. I could have tried doing this graphically for flat perfect colors, but Knight did his linework by hand on physical media and it would not be easy to mimic without doing the same. Naturally, all of the details of the figure were altered for Sadie's sake, with the hairstyle, eye colors, makeup, brows, and costume all being changes I brought in to match the LDD character. The only thing I did digitally was the book text on the lower right.

I was also able to paint the front door, finally. I had painted both sides over with white as a primer, but I ended up only painting the exterior side of the door pink because the color didn't work for the living room inside. I left the interior side white. Here's the front exterior view now. Gluing the doorknobs back on was very delicate and difficult to align between the sides of the door, and involved some comical reaching, poking, and stumbling around the two sides of the house to make a sequence of gluing steps, but I got it done.

I like a front door that makes a statement. I used to live in a brick house with a door we painted red.

I also bought a couple of furnishings at the craft store--a bookshelf for Sadie's room and a metal fridge for the kitchen, as well as some wooden chests--one for set dressing in the attic (as well as storage for extra portraits), and the other to harvest a hinge from to attach the trapdoor with. I could have bought a kitchen sink unit and toilet, too, but the pieces at Michael's looked really poorly-made and I wanted to see what other stores would offer in comparison before committing. I did get some molded plastic sheets with a white rustic brick pattern, which I figured could be the bathroom floor tile, and got foam board to make the walls. 

The bathroom walls cut easily with a paper slicer, which was the smart move after attempts to cut foam board manually disappointed me. I sized them pretty well without technical precision just by narrowing it down cut by cut until it fit. The pieces aren't firm and flush to every surface, but if they're to be removable on a whim, they shouldn't be tight. I glued the walls together at a 90-degree angle. The plastic sheet "tile" mat got cut down in the slicer to fit between the walls, but I glued it on with a lot of overhang and then cut off the excess with an X-Acto while the piece was glued on to get a pretty clean edge. If I had tried to cut it all to size in the slicer, I could have cut too much off and wasted the material. Two sides was enough to get right, then the rest could be chopped off while attached for a guaranteed fit.

It would have been more logistically frustrating to glue the tile mat to the walls so it was all removable, and the dollhouse wall on the left was going to be a piece of the bathroom anyway, so there wasn't much point in trying to have the entire room be removable.

Securing the trapdoor in the attic was difficult. Trying to glue the hinge on was fragile and while I found the right swinging position, the piece wasn't staying affixed. I put a screw in the trapdoor half to keep the hinge secure on that side, and then very painstakingly bored holes in the ceiling using the other half of the hinge as a marker and somehow got screws into those, securing it. Very tricky to do on an assembled dollhouse, but not as difficult as cutting the panel! 

The trapdoor is snug when closed, so I reconsidered my plan to have a sliding latch. I remembered how most attics work and realized many attic hatches have a pull cord, so I decided to add a rope to the hatch instead for Sadie to more plausibly get it open. It stays closed when closed and then pulls down on the cord to open, like the real thing. (The attic in my current house is accessed through my bedroom like Sadie's, with my access being in a closet, but the hatch in my house is just a loose wood panel that fits in place and lifts up and onto the attic floor, and you need to source a separate ladder to get up there.)

To add the ladder mechanism, I tied some cord to a wooden dowel and built matching hubs the bar would slot into so it could be turned and roll up the ladder like a winch. I used metal nuts and drill mechanism pieces to prop them on so the ladder would have space to roll up, and put a wooden bead on the end as a knob to turn it with. I tried figuring out the placement, but the bar needed to be wider than the end of the trapdoor for an appropriate ladder shape, and while I could weight the cord to encourage it to unroll automatically when it fell, fitting the mechanism in seemed treacherous. My two big adjustments came when I decided to switch to a thin yarn for the ladder, glued on instead, so it would roll and unroll more neatly, and to mount the winch mechanism behind the trapdoor on the attic floor instead so the mechanism and ladder wouldn't be too limited in size. A nut is tied to the end of each vertical string of the ladder to pull it down and unspool the ladder when the door falls. Here's the whole mechanism, glued to a base of Bristol board to make the thing easier to install. Gluing both sides of the winch to the floor and getting it right inside the attic would be too hard, so having them pre-secured on a base was helpful.

And put into place. 

As I hoped, the weights rapidly unspool the ladder once the trapdoor falls into the bedroom. The ladder might stop a bit high for ideal climbing, but at this point, it has to do. 

To create the pull-string for the hatch, I used another piece of the same yarn threaded through a skull-shaped bead. I glued this to the short thin face of the trapdoor, opposite the hinge. Sadie will definitely need to stand on something to reach this, but that's expected since attic pull cords aren't meant to hang so low you could hit yourself in the face with them.

Here's the trapdoor in action. I'm delighted it works so well.

I don't know just how unsafe this would be in real life. Climbing a rope ladder to the attic is less safe than a rigid one, and weights dropping down and swinging are a bad idea, but attic ladders that fold or slide on a rack can also injure people when being deployed.

This is an absolutely disproportionate amount of time and effort to spend on a feature that would not need to be included in a world of imagination. But I've been primed by great LEGO and Playmobil designs from my childhood to make the house more logical and tactile!

When thinking about fitting doors into the house, I remembered the 1:12 door I've had for over a year and featured in multiple prior photo sessions.

This door here (the door and doll are real, the rest of the photo is composited!)

The door came from the same dollhouse section of Hobby Lobby that the house model itself can be found in. Unfortunately, the internal jamb of the door is too wide and tall to slide into the doorway cut in the second-floor wall. I decided to go to the store with my unholy purpose and see what they had. I'd need another door for the bathroom, anyway.

At Hobby Lobby, who would be very disappointed to know what I was using their moralist Christian products for, I found the dollhouse kit which provided the brand name of the manufacturer on the box--Real Good Toys. 

Learning the brand name was invaluable because the doors on offer this day were scant and not for interior use, so getting a lead to the website where I could order compatible interior doors was a huge help. As it happened, I easily found a kit with two doors that would work, even modeled on this house in the pictures! I marked that for later.

Jesus gets you a bargain, apparently, because the Hobby Lobby price for this house kit is significantly less than it is direct from Real Good Toys. As an outside observer, I still don't believe the Hobby Lobby corporation follows His teachings correctly. Aesthetically, I resent the company's refusal to acknowledge Halloween. Morally, I resent their stance on reproductive rights and healthcare therein, their "Christmas is the only winter holiday" lens, and their implicit homophobia. I'm aware this indignation does little as long as I am a customer, and I can only swear to continue to use their products for nefarious purposes. That's not really enough, but so be it. For a creative, they're unfortunately a useful source distinct from other craft stores around me.

Also at Hobby Lobby, I got some, but not all, of the furniture I needed. I got a bathroom set with a tub, sink, and toilet, two kitchen pieces (a corner cabinet/counter/sink unit and an oven/stove), and a rocking chair and a rug. 

The rocking chair is primarily for the attic and can remain unpainted, but it can move to Sadie's room or the porch if I choose. There's always a ghoulie rocking a chair invisibly in a creepy house, so this was essential.

The bathroom set isn't ideal since there's so little space in the bathroom area I made and it couldn't afford to expand. The tub is really cute and I deeply love a bath myself, but it's too large if I want the toilet in there too. A slightly wider, less long tub would interact better with a LDD Mini than this model. The fit inside isn't totally right. I may see about the corner shower module from Real Good Toys to see if that would free some space. Showers are scarier than bathtubs, anyhow, what with the stabbings and the creatures behind the curtains. I have to see how the door would be able to open into the room, too. Hm.

I'd love to have it arranged like this with a shower unit:

But I think the shower would take up too much of the wall for the toilet to fit next to it there. Maybe the toilet could go on the same wall as the sink and mirror, between them and the shower.

For the kitchen, I thought the best available units for the shape of my dollhouse room would be a tall corner cabinet and counter/sink set and a separate oven/stove that can line up with it. The cabinet piece has multiple opening doors, with window doors on the top. Only the lower door on the angled section does not open.

The oven has an opening door, but the drawer below it is fake. The oven interior does not look metal and has no racks. The cabinet piece also has no shelves dividing the cabinets.

While my instinct would be to put the kitchen table by the light of the window and have the cooking section at the back, this butts against and highlights the fourth wall in a distracting manner and you can't photograph the scenery as well.

This setup makes more sense as a dollhouse. Having the table in the foreground will let both halves of the room shine for display. 

Maybe the fridge can move again, since it really doesn't make sense against the front wall of the house. Right next to the doorway on the foreground side would work.

I didn't find the table I needed on this trip, though, so that will be another acquisition. I think a round table is called for...or maybe that's my lived experience driving me to the familiar. My kitchen eating table was circular. Sadie doesn't really have the place in this house to put a more formal elongated dining table for a larger party of company, but I don't think she's going to be hosting dinner parties, anyway. She'd probably end up using any guests to eat for dinner--not to share with!

I also bought a pack of three mirror frames and popped the mirrors out to use the frames for more portraits. The set included an oval white frame. I got it for Frozen Charlotte, a very special doll I wanted to honor, and who I thought needed a Victorian oval frame. The ring on the inside of the frame was painted copper, so I covered it with powder blue to suit Charlotte. I took a new photo of her to use for the frame, which came out just right. Because I wanted her frame to look more like a photograph, I cut a piece of plastic from the furniture packaging to fit into the frame as a pane of glass and then cut her portrait to size to put behind it. I glued it together, and used excess superglue and white paint to create a frost effect as if her picture frame is as frozen as her. 

I eventually put this frame on an attic nail below Macumba's portrait since there wasn't a better space for it to shine.

The second frame in the pack had a circular cutout, and I struggled to figure out who to use it for until I decided Teddy could be the subject in a portrait in Sadie's bedroom. It made sense for a doll based on a classic children's stuffed toy. The frame was metallic gold, but I repainted it solid white with gloss to feel better for a kid's room. I took a new picture of Teddy, too, since I didn't have one that worked already.

I repeated the steps I did for Charlotte's to create "glass" for the frame and cut it and the picture to size.

The last frame is a small, translucent, almost mineral-textured brown frame, and is very narrow, so I didn't know what to use it for. I realized I could create a vertical composition with the halves of Viv separated on a background, so I made a new picture with her, aiming for a surreal twist on classical painted figures and all their drapery.

I digitally expanded the background a bit to tweak the proportions for the frame's aspect ratio, and cut the piece to size. I glued it to card to make it sturdier before putting it in the frame. This one is meant to be a painting, but I think it suits a matte texture so I didn't apply a gloss over it.

This piece ultimately went into the hallway next to Sadie's bedroom door.

Making this dollhouse at this stage of the LDD collection definitely gives me the advantage as I have a wide backlog of photo subjects to fill frames with!

I also added one more nail downstairs to the wall right by the door so another piece can hang. Maybe I wanted all three of the witch portraits I made to be able to display simultaneously, should I so choose. Sue me. This nail was much harder to install, but by sliding the hammer through the doorway in the dividing wall, I was able to grab the end of the hammer in the kitchen and hit the nail from that angle.

The rug I got is visible below the chair.

I started selecting some toys for Sadie's room, grabbing some tiny dolls that pose with wire--one fabric, one with plastic pieces. The latter must be a Lundby doll.

Both are from my mom's childhood pieces, so they're untouched. Despite my oath to keep these toys unaltered, I was struck by just how easy it would have been to turn this other Lundby into Sadie herself with a dress dye and black hair. This is a real 1960s toy, and Series 1 Sadie hits that look really well.

It's a shame I have a snowball's chance in hell of finding another copy of this Lundby. I decided to ask my mom if she was okay with me altering it after all--with the full promise to back off for a no. I was very excited when I got the go-ahead.

To work on the doll, I pulled out the hair and took the head off, leaving two wires in the neck of the detached head which I will need to push back into the body. The collar of the dress is plastic and I removed it from threads sewing it on so I can dye the fabric alone. I was relieved to find the dress not to be sewn to the body, and pulled it up over the arms once the head was out.

You can see better how these sixties Lundbys worked--the wire body armature is covered in wrapped thread (and it looks like, a layer of foam) in a flesh tone that forms the limbs and torso while keeping the body flexible without the need for sewing or, presumably, stuffing. The visual isn't perfect with the plastic not matching the fiber body, but with this costume, it works better. The arms are fully covered, so the only part of the fiber skintone is the legs at the bottom of the skirt, and they're not right next to a plastic piece that exposes the discrepancy more clearly.

I'd forgotten I was out of black dye for the dress, so I had to order some more. These next steps occurred much later on, but I dyed the dress, painted the shoes, and glued some deconstructed macrame cord to her head as hair. For the face, I scraped out some of the paint on her left eye to create the white iris effect, which looked better than painting over with a dot of white paint would have. The cheeks were scraped to un-blush them, and the lips were painted. Here's the finished doll.

The hair fibers are a bit wavy and I can try boiling them, but I think the doll product in reality is more charming than the sketch I edited onto the earlier photo. The doll is much darker than Sadie, but she doesn't have to look exact because she's an old doll. The little chair is from another furtniure set I got for the small table included (for Sadie's bedside, and the two chairs didn't make sense to use for Sadie herself, but one is the perfect size for Lundby-Sadie.

During the time while I couldn't finish the Lundby-Sadie, I found my brain rocketing to another direction for Sadie's playroom--matryoshkas! It's a personal touch, to be sure, having grown up with and adoring Russian folk art meant to support my national heritage as an adoptee. But matryoshkas are pretty iconic toys regardless. The traditional Russian ones are the best; though. Other art styles on the shape don't compare to me.

I decided to make a matryoshka of Sadie herself, and I wanted to make things harder for myself and do a functional nesting doll--I took the smallest two stages of a cheap, messy matryoshka to repaint. Only two dolls. That's all I can manage. The matryoshka will be quite large for Sadie, but smaller matryoshkas, which do exist and which I do have, would just be too difficult to work with. I sanded the larger doll completely to get as blank and matte of a surface as I could manage, though I brought in a sandpaper that was too rough at one point, leaving the doll a little jaggy. I found the cleanest area I could and emulated the style of the platonic-ideal matryoshka--the peasant woman in the yellow head scarf. I own such a copy:

I've worked with Russian folk-art homage and matryoshka aesthetics before, including a blank one I painted as Baba Yaga--though I didn't have the drive to make a full set, so I just painted the largest doll and cut a coin slot in the back to turn her into a bank.

So I came into the minis relatively prepared. And my less refined paint work would pass much better at the smaller scale.

For the Sadie matryoshka, I left the naked wood unpainted as the color of the face and arms/hands/apron like the real thing, and painted on for the hair, scarf, and skirt. The doll has a classic matryoshka face but with Sadie's eye colors and dark lipstick in a smirk, and I added the red X scar again for more detail. The color scheme is all changed so her scarf is white, her skirt is black, and the deco on her apron features a black rose with green leaves to make the palette all very Sadie while feeling proper for a classic matryoshka--I think the look turned out really cohesive. I also painted a knife in her grip. 

The smaller matryoshka just got painted over the finished tiny piece after sanding down some blobbed jagged varnish errors, since I didn't have the patience or dexterity to strip such a small piece's paint and I needed the original face paint for guidance far more on the tiny piece than I did on the larger one. I painted the left eye white again and did the white scarf, and painted the lower half black with an apron featuring a red sulfur sign and leaves. The apron is white on the smaller doll because the whole thing except the face was painted yellow and I wasn't sanding down to the blank wood just for the apron's sake.

But halfway through painting the Sadie matryoshka, I realized that I was doing the wrong character. Matryoshkas split on a center "waist" seam, making them ideal for a gag based on LDD Viv, not Sadie! 

So screw it. Why not both???

I found another matryoshka (it opens, but I don't think it ever had a smaller doll inside while I owned it) and sanded it down. This doll is taller and larger than the one I Sadie-fied, so this is an especially large piece for Minis Sadie to play with, but I appreciated the increased ease the larger size provided in painting. Figuring out how to put Viv into matryoshka proportions was difficult because she's in an entirely different outfit from the Russian peasant-lady garb, but I figured out how to make it work. Her jacket and top formed the lower curve of her face while her hair framed the top and fell behind. For Viv, I put the arms up to make her look alarmed and keep them off the waist seam, and inverted the eye design to make her look like she's looking downward and stressed out. I drew her screaming mouth with teeth as well, and added her eyebrows and used thinner red shading around her eyes. Her jacket's sequins are represented by white dots which help to delineate the jacket and hair, which had to be the same solid red. 

The costume stops above and below the waist to mimic the doll's bare midriff, and a red line is painted around the seam like the doll's bloody cut. The lower body is black below the midriff with white crisscross designs to loosely suggest her fishnet tights. I'm ridiculously proud of how I managed to stylize the character into a tiny matryoshka design. 

I later added a knotted red cord glued between the halves to act as stylized viscera spilling out after her cut, seeing as the LDD has molded organs on the tube that plugs into her upper torso. Since there isn't any smaller doll for this gag, it made sense to replicate the gory aspect in a different play feature that fit a folk-toy look.

To create the authentic gloss varnish on all of these dolls, I looked up good methods, since previous attempts with brush-on gloss varnish from craft stores have been unsatisfactory. Either the gloss shows too much brushstroke, or the varnish itself is too thick and you can see a bluish tint, or the varnish sticks to surfaces and peels or picks up flecks of color from other painted things. One method recommended was polyurethane coating...and I just happened to already have a can in the cupboard which I'd never paid notice to or used. I'd heard you could brush on gloss and sand between coats to get an even finish, but that sounded a bit too finicky for me, and these pieces were small enough to just dip in, so I turned to spiking the dolls on needle tools to serve as dipping handles and let them drip and dry in a cup. The two-part dolls were dipped assembled because the polyurethane couldn't get in the seam and they cleanly popped apart afterward. They needed multiple dip coats to get where I wanted them, and some sanding and trimming on the base to remove excess varnish making them unstable. On the larger Sadie doll, I did do some sanding between coats to smooth out the worst of the rougher texture. 

Matryoshka Viv drying on a spike.

Since I was so excited about this wood lacquer now in my toolkit, I didn't want to stop, and I realized I could do one more thing--a traditional Japanese kokeshi doll depicting LDD's Yuki-Onna. The oldest kokeshi were basically balls on columns, painted and glossed similarly to matryoshkas which emerged afterward, leading to suggestions that kokeshi were an influence on the classic matryoshka. I used some small wooden parts and paint, and resorted to using pen for some finer details on the face--I just blasted it with a hairdryer to make certain the pen ink would not bleed in the polyurethane.

I really like this piece. 

This was the first piece of the dollhouse I made referencing a Living Dead Doll I hadn't personally collected yet, but I got her before this part of the project was published. Her review publication is still upcoming because the third of her roundup trio ended up not shipped and in limbo due to an unresponsive seller and I'm still awaiting an order cancellation so I can figure out something (either a different order of the doll or a different doll) to get the roundup back on track. Ugh.

Here's the mini kokeshi with the LDD herself as a little preview of the doll.

I also decided to lacquer the floor of Sadie's room with the polyurethane much later on in the process, after I was done working on the dividing wall and it was in place with no further need for removal. The glossy acrylic paint still felt too much like acrylic paint. I wanted that satisfying true smooth texture.

Enough wood. But not enough toys!

I decided to turn to LEGO to build Sadie a little rolling duck.

The duck is eighteen pieces.

If you've been here on the blog, there's no guesses which LDD character this is referencing! The choice to use LEGO was primarily motivated by the fact that it was the easiest medium to execute my idea in (the existence of the minifigure sailor hat piece was the big thing), but it also serves as a reference to LEGO history itself, since, before they made building bricks, their first toy was a wooden rolling duck! 

LEGO is actually very hard to build in microscale because there's so much less wiggle room with the parts you can use, and getting the wheels on and managing the angles studs had to attach with was a challenge as far as making the proportions look good and the model not too messy. It took a healthy amount of time and revisions to find the most simultaneously efficient and effective design. 

Case in point: this was my first design for the head, until I realized I did actually have possession of a 1x1 red plate with a tooth to create a more natural duck bill shape.

The less satisfactory first take.

I'm very pleased with the final result. There wasn't a great place to put a LEGO string stud piece to pull it with because I wanted the front to reflect Quack's grey belly, so I left the toy stringless. Attached the way they are with a clip on the bar in the middle, the wheels cannot rotate freely and truly roll, but the visual suggestion is there. They can attach to vehicle pieces with thinner clips that grab the axles on the sides so they spin for real, but the bar attachment is a versatile option for them to be used in decorative builds, and lets them serve as dumbbell weights for minifigures, too. The build would be even more accurate to Quack if the sailor hat was dark grey like the doll's, but such a piece hasn't been made yet.

Partially because I wanted to expand Sadie's collection, and partially just to see if I could, I also tried seeing if I could give Sadie "dolls" made of LEGO minifigure renditions of LDD characters (basically, LDD-ception; the Living Dead Dolls in Mini Sadie's universe!) using the "purist custom" method. Purist customs refer to achieving a likeness to a known figure with only existing LEGO parts--no altering print designs, using paint, or introducing unofficial pieces. For my renditions to get off the ground at all, I had to use heads turned backward to the blank side since I had no face prints that matched any LDDs, but from there, I was able to get a few done!

The first I realized I could do was Lottie when I found the white torso with back buttons. This piece and the black ruffle collar were from the Minifigures Series 10 Sad Clown, who I no longer had all of the pieces to, so they were fair game. The hands stayed black because white hands would convey bare arms and I didn't have white arms with printed black cuffs or dual-molded arms with a white upper, black lower design. The skirt from the Mushroom Sprite finished the silhouette of the flared coat.

I had gone in with the character references not wanting to reference any character more than once, but I ultimately had to relax the restriction to only referencing X character once per medium--meaning, for example, a character can't get two oil paintings on the wall, but Hollywood passes with a printed movie poster, a signed photograph, and a toy rendition in Sadie's collection. The LDD characters offer so many avenues to depict them in this dollhouse world that to restrict myself further would prevent good ideas, especially here where the best LEGO renditions I could achieve were of characters referenced elsewhere.

Siren was the next figure I got together, and she's the best of them all. The body is Disney Minifigures Series 1 Maleficent's, as is the cape. I just flipped the high collar downward on her back to depict the loose hood of the cape and changed out the arms. I think the likeness is really strong. 

Hollywood came third, based on me having the curly white hair. I hooked a cape around her wrists to suggest her draped feathers, but the figure is less recognizable since LEGO doesn't have gory head prints.

Vincent Vaude came after I got on a Series 5 theme. I had to sacrifice color accuracy in giving him the only torso and legs with a suspender design I had. I didn't have any pieces in the right colors that looked more like Vincent's costume.

The last was the Bride of Valentine. Her hairstyle is totally different, but it conveys the white streaks plus a lightning Frankenstein theme. Her skintone is whiter than the doll's, but the torso does a decent job imitating her dress. Really, the drive was the fact that LEGO has a human heart accessory achieved with a printed 1x1 round brick. This is the only minifigure LDD I built of a doll I don't own so far, and as of publishing this very post, is now the only feature referencing a doll I don't currently have. That's likely to change very soon because February is coming up...

That's a good stopping point for this chunk of the documentation. Again, there's still a lot I've done already which this post doesn't catch up to. More on that soon!