After a fun week in MO with my in-laws, I am finally back from vacation! Check out how I spent my time off and then take a tour of my freshly cleaned workshop!
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T'was the week before Christmas
At CustomDollBaby.com Babies raced to get ready To go home to their Moms! The last several days seem like a blur. Rooting, wig making, gluing, sealing, stuffing, weighting...All the final details need to come together so all my Christmas babies are dressed up, packed up and shipped by end of day Monday. Every second counts because it's the final countdown! And I'm running with Elf-Like Precision, training for Christmas Day! While you might be worried about how much Halloween candy you need to buy, my head is 100% in Christmas. I'm already busy making sure that babies who need to be on Santa's Sleigh Christmas Eve will get there on time. Well, I guess I'm not the only one managing my Holiday deadlines... Today was Inventory Day. Even though I don't have updates on any of my dolls, I can still give you an update on what I'm working on. When you're juggling multiple custom orders, its critical to keep track of inventory. That way you avoid buying things you don't need, scrambling to acquire the things you forgot, or accidentally putting the wrong eyes in the wrong doll. To help me keep track of my inventory at CustomDollBaby.com, I developed a Microsoft Access database, CDB-CRM3 (Custom Doll Baby Customer Relationship Management, version 3) with the following functionality:
This video is a quick demo of how I track and manage my inventory at Custom Doll Baby.com. I'm happy to answer questions! Just Leave a Reply! Greetings from Jamestown, NC! After a long and busy month of relocating, I'm excited to announce that this New Englander has finally flown South! I still have a lot of unpacking to do, but my workshop is back up and running. Feels good to be home! Something about moving makes me regret every item I ever bought. LOL So many boxes. So much stuff. Time to make some trips to Salvation Army!
The day I traded my little convection over for the Nuwave Pro Infrared Oven, I thought my days of oven calibration were over. Don't get me wrong: the Nuwave oven is ideal for reborning. Highly recommended. But now I have encountered a new challenge: freezing cold weather. Weather impacts my ability to turn vinyl dolls into lifelike babies because I use Genesis Heat-Set Paints. Heat set paints are wonderful. They do not cure until you are ready to cure, allowing for intricate layering and blending of effects to create gorgeously realistic baby dolls. BUT the difficulty with heat-set paint is the fact that vinyl releases toxic, noxious fumes when heated. To protect my health, I always cure and cool my dolls outside. This was working great until we reached freezing temperatures here in CT. Suddenly, my wonderful Nuwave oven could not keep up. So, this evening was dedicated to oven calibration. How quickly does the oven reach the desired temperature? Can it hold that temperature? Does it get too hot to overcompensate for the outdoor temp? (BTW this was a huge issue with my old convection oven.) If the oven gets too hot, you risk melting the vinyl. It was time to experiment and get some answers. The first test bake was at 60% power - my usual temp. As I suspected, the poor oven could not maintain 250 degrees in extreme cold weather. It took 8 minutes to get to 250 and then it wavered between 250 and 240 for the rest of the cook time. Ideal curing temp for Genesis is 250 - 265 for 8 minutes. My paint would never set under these conditions. The next available increment on the NuWave is 70% power. Therein lies the graph. The oven reached 250 in only 2 min, and consistently stayed above ideal paint curing temp (the red line). Yet on occasion we'd hit 280 trying to fight the freezing outdoor temp. My paint would certainly cure, but would we damage the vinyl?
Good thing I keep my test parts handy. I popped a test leg in the oven at 70% power to see what would happen. The paint certainly cured, the vinyl was hot and soft, but I did not see any shiny spots or other evidence of melting. Next, I tried Fahtima's arm - since you can always replace an arm. Good paint adhesion and 0% vinyl damage. She held up even better than my test part. That empowered me to confidently cure the rest of the parts. After an evening of measurements and experiments, my oven is calibrated and Fatima's first layer of paint is done! Just in time too - next week's forecast is even colder...brrrrrr. Nevertheless, I will be signing up for the next class I see on Miracle Blend Air Dry paints. Until I can move to a warmer climate, it's good to have options. :) Welcome to the "In Progress" page of CustomDollBaby.com.
Creating a lifelike baby doll is a labor of love. Hours are invested to create lifelike skin complexions, detailed finger nails, adorable blushing and beautiful hand-rooted hair. While a baby is in progress, stop by regularly to watch a vinyl doll be transformed into a lifelike baby. |
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Reborn Doll ArtistHi! My name is Kim. I am a reborn artist based in NC. I have been creating dolls since I was a child. I discovered the art of life-like baby dolls in 2011 and have been reborning ever since. Archives
December 2016
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