Alias and Moniker are here!

Fedex was actually really fast. Dispatched last night and went out for delivery about 8am this morning. 9:30 just as I was considering a shower, the fed-ex truck appeared.
thank goodness, or i'd have been in the shower and probably missed them.

Anyway, this is gonna be picture heavy.



Interesting they're coming in boxes now, they used to ship in baggies. The packing peanuts feel a little... wasteful. I mean, the tubes protect them fine and were the only protection they had with DHL. Poor environment, I can hear it screaming from all that waste.



I knew I was dying these two so I asked them to do no faceup and not glue the wigs. So the wigs were sent in completely separate bags lol. There's a sort of shoulder length blonde one and a brown fur one.



And here they are! Moniker in the dinosaur outfit, Alias in the minecraft top.
Usually i'd have ordered the boy in a girl outfit I didn't already have but I figured another pair of black shorts might come in useful.

The did come with shoes as well, they're in little plastic envelopes at the bottom of the tube.



Moniker looks annoyed, while Alias is just so happy to be here. They both have big sassy eyebrows because I honestly love painting big eyebrows lol. They also both have pierced ears but as often happens, i never actually have earrings laying about for them.



So I got my dye stuff all prepped. Old pot I found in the cupboard, metal bowl for rinsing, dye, dolls, a sponge cake to sustain me... lol.

I also used the slotted spoon, I don't know if it'll survive the process but I don't really care. I'll stick it in the dishwasher and hope for the best.

And now my pc is crashing on me so i'll continue this adventure in the next post. DUN DUN DUUUUN

Moniker is so cute!! I love that face. They both have great faces.
I can't wait to see the dyeing adventures!

Mine arrived in a bag, maybe it's because you were getting two at once? Who knowsssss~

So Alias was first to have a soak, but sadly as I was disassembling him his eye mech broke. I opened up his head, squeezed the prongs to pull the mechanism out and the prong snapped instantly. I very nearly cried.


I had a freak out for a bit, and decided to put him to one side and dye Moniker first while I decided what to do.



Mmm Makie soup.

Ok, so I followed the same method used by a couple of other members here. Enough water to immerse the doll, a cup of white vinegar (in my case some "Distilled malt vinegar" which is actually clear) and a whole pack of powdered Rit.

Moniker i used Royal Blue for.

As soon as I dropped the pieces in they started to turn a vivid blue colour, and by the time i'd set a timer they were already a wonderfully deep shade. So I fished them out with a slotted spoon and rinsed them in the sink. They didn't bleed at all, in fact the colour seemed to have absorbed nice and deep.
So I let the piece dry, put the foam inserts back in (they actually help keep the arm joints from flopping I discovered. The arms flop really badly if you remove them. Go figure.



A lovely bright smurf blue.

The blonde wig it turned out, didn't suit her though. Thankfully I happened to have a bright red wig in my stash.

The colour was awesome but the style was too bleh. So I hacked it into a weird asymmetrical do.

I happened to have another set of full round glass eyes that I bought back when i ordered Sa'dii. I knew they'd be perfect.

Used up the last of my pound shop lashes too. I only had enough to do the edges of her eyes but I quite like the effect.



I made the hat a few weeks ago. it's actually a little bit small but by the time i'd sewn all that vinyl together I wasn't about to start again. It squeezes on fine. I might attach some sort of strap to keep it on lol.

I love how the color turned out! Those eyes really suit her too

So I spent a few hours altering Alias' eyes and cutting his fur wig into a mohawk, but I really desperately wanted to finish him. So I decided I could live with a broken eye mech, i'd just do what I did with my Makies with full rounds and ram blue tac in there and hope for the best.

That seemed to work, so into the dye bath he went.

This time Kelly Green rit.

Same method, but I was a little less patient this time and threw the parts in while the water was hot but not fully steaming.
Not sure if it would have made any difference though.

See, as soon as the parts went in the blue element of the dye immediately started to soak into the doll. He was looking rather a pretty soft teal colour, which wasn't at all what the colour should have been.
I kept stirring, then noticed dark spots forming on the parts, particularly on the face. Oh dear.
I poked them to see if I could make them come off and they mostly burst into a more yellowish green. Presumably that was the yellow pigment that wasn't dissolving properly.
I kept stirring till I was pretty sure the parts weren't going to get any greener, I even tried throwing some yellow food colouring into the mix but it seemed the doll was determined to be teal.

So I fished the bits out and rubbed the spots as best i could. They looked like freckles and most of them didn't rub off, good thing I was planning to freckle him up anyway huh?

He dyed in a much more patchy manner than Moniker. His chest is more green and half one leg is more greenish where the yellow pigment did manage to soak in a bit more, but it's soaked in in these sort of splotches. I think it looks cool and doubt I could ever get it to happen intentionally and thankfully, this shade of teal green is actually one of my favourite colours. So all in all, serendipitous.



Doing a natural looking faceup on such a dark skinned doll was really quite difficult. With a girl you can get away with dark lips as "lipstick" but I was wary of making him look too much like he was wearing makeup.

I love how they turned out, I can't stop looking at them. They're so vivid and fun. 
They're "the Kobold Kids" lol, though she needs some more wardrobe options and he could do with a better vest.

It makes me even more sad about the discontinuing of the nylon body because achieving this sort of colour on a regular non porus body just won't happen. I actually tried dying some regular IM plastic doll parts in the pot while I had it, they didn't take on even a tint. Nothing...

I'm thinking I may need a couple more colourful Makies before they're gone forever...

They're amazing! I adore the light freckles on Moniker!
Congrats on another two amazing makies!

aww thanks everyone! I'm super happy with them. But... they make me desperately want another couple to dye crazy colours. I'm thinking purple and orange would be nice, or maybe a more apple green if I could find something that would act more predictably. Hmmm.
I gotta scrape some money together fast.

Oh, they're great! Moniker is the same color as Theral, so I love her instantly! She's beautiful, too. Oh man, I'm going to wish I'd bought more! But you know I can't afford it!

Awesome!

I can't stop scrolling through and looking at them. The dye color, and the wig selection, and the goggles, ahhhhhh! I'm going to miss dyed makies so much.

So am I artful! I'm trying to figure out if I can justify just one more.. I want a purple one... I also want a properly green one but teal will probably sate me. Still, perfect world i'd have a purple girl and a lovely apple green boy too.
*sob sob sob* Someone buy my ebay stuffffff

lol.

UGH I still wish I had a couple exta 75 to order a couple of whites ;-; but so cool Monk

They look fantastic! I keep scrolling back up to look at them.

It makes me want to buy white makies so that I can dye them! All my OCs are human so I haven't had a need for it, but it looks like so much fun to customize their whole body you did such a good job!

Amazing pair!

They are cool! They look like a couple of space rebels, or maybe intergalactic smugglers. ^_^

I can just see them sharing a pint and the latest rebellion news with Han Solo and Chewbacca in some spaceport dive. ^_~


Mmmm..... White ones to dye........ So tempting!

Alias is really an amazing color; the color is truly beautiful. It's amazing to me that the Kelly Green Rit turns out like that! I'm going to have a really big think about how I dye Ilaria! My dye collection is currently Kelly Green, Tan, and Golden Yellow, and I think I will use those to make her color, but I will have to mess around with the proportions after seeing Alias.

They look fantastic! When did you first get into dyeing dolls?

I think Jupiter, adding some yellow to the mix should work. Sour was dyed with kelly green and yellow wasn't she? So i'd try to aim for that sort of mix maybe. I've seen online that Kelly Green seems to be really unpredictable, I suspect it's really very temperature sensitive. Blue seems to cling to porous surfaces while yellow seems to need a higher temperature to dissolve properly. So i'd suggest letting it boil, turning it down to simmer and mixing the heck out of it before putting any parts in. I was impatient and just had it steaming but not boiling, which may have contributed to the blue being more dominant.

I would really like an apple green coloured doll though, but i'm not sure how to achieve  that. Dye is one of those things, it's not always predictable. I might ask  the lab if they can pretty please send me some more scraps, they only sent me like 4 pieces last time, I don't think they have many these days. I suppose I could dye someone's eye mech lol. I mean you never see it so if it wasn't the right colour it wouldn't matter.

I'm trying to scrape together funds for another white to dye now. But ebay sales aren't going as well as hoped. *sigh* It's surprisingly difficult to sell ooak dolls.
So tonight I think i'm going to list up the last of the stuff from my "sell piles" as huge bundles and be done with it hah.

Just hope I can pool funds in time.

I hope so too! I'd love to see an apple green doll!

In any case, I had initially read Artful owl's post on how Sour was dyed and thought I'd maybe do 3:1 yellow to kelly green, since I remember her mentioning that Sour is basically hulk green in spite of what the camera may suggest. I want to achieve a slightly greenish yellow. But I think I have a better understanding of how strong the green is after seeing Alias. At this point my plan is to add the yellow and maybe some tan, then keep adding little bits of the green and test with a paper towel dipped in to see if it's the right shade. I've been obsessing over the Pantone color recipes on the Rit website for a long time and I'm still not 100% confident in my plan. I wish they had more recipes on the site.

Good luck! I'd really like a vivid purple and a bright green but I fear any purple would end up too blue due to the blue loving nylon so much.
Might have to look into Idye instead, their green I think is more a neon granny smith sort of green hahaha.

I can't help but think that purple and even orange would be so cool! I know a lot of people don't like orange, but I suppose it's more a sense that I'd love to see a rainbow, even if the Makies were in different homes in different countries. Personally, I'd love to make a really pale aqua girl and a goth girl. But I suppose Allie will have to be enough goth for this home.

I will definitely document my process no matter what I do.

Well, Morel will be purple (barring some unforseen change), so I can be a guinea pig on that account. I may need to mess with some of the idye poly, but haven't gotten to the store yet. (Also, it looks like she will be spending the long weekend at a depot 10 minutes from my house, so that isn't infuriating at all.) Anywho, I'll share the results with you guys when it happens.