Happy New Year everyone! I spent the first few days of 2013 in bed with the flu, but I medicated myself to make it to the first Dollfie Dream meetup of the year in Toronto, with our special guest Otakusan167 who was visiting from Alberta, Canada! I’m a bit behind with my blogging but I’m going to do my best to catch up over the next few days!
Since I had zero energy to dress up my girls in new outfits, I brought Aerie and Gabi with me, since they were already dressed up for the “Winter Casual” theme ^__~” Gabi is wearing her pretty pink coat still from her visit to Germany – Photo by: Otakusan167
Since I was working on Christmas I wanted to bring a bit of home with me, since it’s never fun being far from home during the holidays, when everyone else is celebrating with friends and family. Since I was in Mainz, Germany, I brought Gabrielle with me since it’s kind of her Vaterland ^__~” (I’ve always thought that her DDS Akira default outfit was very German looking). My original plan was to dress her up in her default outfit but I really didn’t like it AT ALL and couldn’t change her out of it fast enough! So instead she dressed for a chilly winter day!
Here’s Gabi on Ludwigstraße, with a beautiful Christmas Tree set up in the plaza in front of the Theatre. Behind is the St. Martin’s Dom –
(I got lots of weird stares whenever I pulled Gabi out of my tote bag for pictures @__@” It’s not so bad when I’m with a group but in a foreign country it was quite awkward >__<" )
To all my wonderful friends all around the world, I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a joyous new year. I hope that you are spending your holiday season with friends, family or loved ones~!
Thank you so much to everyone that sent me a Christmas card! I love receiving mail and your cards make me so happy. They are decorating my fireplace right now!
Thank you all for reading my blog, for your comments and for allowing me to share my love of this hobby with your all!
Happy Holidays!
– ♥ Archangeli, AlphaZ, and the kitties (Charlie & Bubba)
Happy Holidays everyone! I’ve had a few small Christmas doll gatherings at my house in the past few weeks but I’ve been quite busy at work so everything will be lumped into one long post!
A few weeks ago PlasticFantastic brought Nia, Lily and Maya over to help decorate the Christmas Tree! Continue reading →
Last weekend I had the good luck to be in Vancouver the same time as the big holiday-season doll meetup in Vancouver! I was only able to stop by for a couple of hours before running off to work, but it was so nice to see my Vancouver-based doll friends and meet some new ones too!
The meet was in the party room of one of the member’s condo, and it was a nice casual meet with many different types of dolls. I’ve never attended such a large meetup before but I felt right at home since the members are very friendly and I’ve met several Vancouver-based doll owners over the past year or so ^__^”
Unfortunately I left my brain in Toronto, and forgot to bring my doll carrier bag with me (*sigh*) so I had no dollies of my own with me, so I went around taking pictures of everyone else’s dolls instead. Continue reading →
Today a few of my girls helped me to formally welcome home the newest Dollfie Dream the family! Aerie, Serena, Lily, Rin and Médée would like to introduce Sakura Matou!
I’m very excited to have Rin Tohsaka’s sister from Fate/Stay Night, but she is also Serena’s sister since I adopted her from my late friend D.ark. I’m very honoured to be able to give this pretty girl a loving new home.
It’s hard to believe that November has come and gone. It’s been an amazing month – I had the chance to meet lots of new friends in the Dollfie Dream community across oceans, I celebrated my birthday in London and before the the craziness of December and the holiday season comes upon us, I just wanted to look back at the beautiful autumn months with a few photos that were featured on the VolksUSA blog today. ^___^”
In other news, the Volks Dollfie Dream Xenosaga pre-order project for KOS-MOS and M.O.M.O. has opened and will be running until January 20, 2013. I’ve already placed my order – and advise anyone else that’s interested to do so too, this is a good opportunity to get a beautiful Dollfie Dream without having to contend with lotteries!
My sister and I went to London last week for a short vacation to visit our cousin, and while we were there we met up with several UK-based Dollfie Dream owners at Hyper Japan!
I had arranged to meet up with Jezatron, GabrielVH, CookieDude_2332, Aquilla429, UiNeonSkittles, Pink_Blaise, Fransgaard and Bethykins at Hyper Japan to hang out and of course, the Dollfie Dreams came out as well!
What exactly is Hyper Japan? In my attempt to describe the event: it’s a small Japanese cultural festival + 1-Day Anime convention + Japanese Food Festival. My friends told me that it’s grown a lot but having attended massive anime conventions like Anime North, Otakon and San Diego Comic Con, HJ is very small by comparison. But what it lacked in size, it made up for with substance! What I loved about it was the abundance of Japanese tourist information, language course info, and the food hall which was almost 1:3 of the whole space, since I’m not really into shopping around dealer’s rooms anymore. Continue reading →
A couple of weeks ago, several Dollfie Dream owners in Toronto got together for our last big meetup of the year! The theme was “Fancy Holiday” dress so everyone came dressed to the nines!
The weather has gotten colder so it wasn’t practical to have an outdoors meetup, so our group went back to Café Princess to enjoy cakes, desserts and hang out!
Earlier this week I was in Hong Kong for work, and through the magic of Twitter, I managed to meet up up with a couple of Dollfie Dream owners: @quentinlau and @Maqywhaq. In my jet-lagged state I forgot my camera in my hotel, so iPhone photos will have to suffice! >;_<;" Sorry!
I brought Hinata with me because she was the only DD dressed in "casual" clothes (you'll see why in a few days) and Quentin brought his awesome Black Rock Shooter custom made by SQ-Labs!
It was so cool to get to see her in person, and study how she was put together. So many subtle details that went into her and it was really interesting to study them, from a technical point of view after encountering some interesting obstacles in making my KOS-MOS custom DD.
I recently ordered the new plastic stand that Volks released specifically for Dollfie Dreams. There was an “all-in-one” box, and several optional components that could be ordered seperately (extra rods and gripping pieces, clear base without tripod mount, and the X-base). It looks very attractive because it’s all clear plastic. I bought the complete stand, an extra set of accessories and the X-base.
I made a quick video to review it. This stand is designed to work as a saddle-stand, waist-hold type stand, thigh-support stand or arm-supporting stand depending on which plastic rods you interchange and how you pivot the claws. I only show the stand as a arm support and thigh stand.
(And at 5:06, I meant to say “a screw and a washer,” not a wingnut >__<” )
Since Dollfie Dreams are fairly stable and can stand quite well, I think these stands were designed to support them in “action” poses, but overall the plastic is very flimsy and wobbly and I wouldn’t recommend using these stands for displaying your doll day to day. My overall impression is that this is more of a “support” stand for taking photos, especially since the base has 2 extra spots to attach a couple sets of rod to support a sword or other type of weapon.
If you were interested in this stand purely because it has a tripod mount, I don’t recommend it simply because it is quite flimsy and the plastic rods can come apart if not pushed all the way into the joints. This could lead to a disaster during a photo session! >__<"
If you have any comments or questions about this new doll stand, send me a message or leave me a comment!
– ♥ Archangeli
Dolls in this video: Rin Tohsaka, Annalise (Rise Kujikawa on DD2 body), Siobhán (Saber Alter on DD3 body) Gabrielle (Akira on DDS body), and Hinata (DD Shino on DDdy3 body) And if you're curious, Annalise and Akira are both on thigh-support stands made by CoolCat, and Siobhán is on a Volks metal-base saddle stand. The other doll stand that I show in this video is the Dollfie World tripod-mountable doll stand.
With scans of the new Volks News starting to surface, there is still little information about the Xenosaga pre-order project. The latest teaser shows more of the weapons that will be available – very exciting!
In lieu of any official news from Volks, I decided to take a few new photos of my custom Dollfie Dream KOS-MOS a few days ago. I’m trying out these new Kurokami eyes on her, and they are interesting but I don’t think I love them. I didn’t put a lot of effort into styling her hair because I have a new wig for my KOS-MOS that I will be cutting and styling very soon.
Last Saturday some members of the local Dollfie Dream community got together for a nice afternoon out with our dolls! We met for lunch downtown at the Marché restaurant and there was a wonderful gathering of beautiful dolls! This is an early group shot – a few girls came later ^__^”
I guess I’ll start by introducing some of these lovely girls!
I was inspired by Aquilla429‘s simple tutorial about making shoe insoles to make 1:3 scale shoes fit DD feet better, and took photos to document a recent project I did. I pulled out a cute Volks outfit in preparation for a DD meetup this weekend, and recalled that the shoes and socks are horrible for staining. I plan to use a bodystocking under the socks, but the more preventative steps I can take to prevent staining – the better – so I decided to make insoles for these shoes.
Here are the offending shoes – the are from Moe’s Gothic Dress set and they are all black inside! T__T”
The last time I had a doll wearing this outfit for about 4 hours and she ended up with some nasty stains on the bottoms of her feet. Most of the stains were concentrated on pressure spots from where the doll was standing – so primarily the heels, balls of her feet and the toes. In most cases it’s pressure between socks and shoes that are the culprit, but since the inside of these shoes are black, it could also contribute to the problem. Continue reading →
I love it when friends come over to my house with their lovely Dollfie Dream girls – it makes for lots of fun photo opportunities! A couple of weeks ago my friends nkei and centurystory stayed late to hang out and take photo’s of nkei’s newest girl – Leone – a Saber Extra.
Here’s Leone with my Sidonie. Even though they are the same sculpt, faceup and eyes they have very different airs about them, don’t they?
Serena didn’t want to miss out on the fun so she dressed up joined in for a few photos too. I’m not used to seeing her as a red-head but she looks very pretty with this wig. These three look so beautiful together!
Leone and Serena –
Sidonie isn’t afriad of heights or taking a few risks.
archangeli 