Nutmeg is a TBLeague "large breast suntan" model, and came with the only head I currently have. I'm not sure how to match heads, I'd love one that looks a little more like teenager than a mature woman, but I love the long, blond hair.
Nutmeg (much like Cinnamon) is fashioned after a character in my stories/gaming. She is supposed to be a wild sprite (and technically shorter than a Phicen/TBLeague doll, but 12" isn't THAT far off). In my imagination/stories sprites are magically bound to a flower, and in a pivotal scene my main character is battling a wraith near Nutmeg's flower and as the wraith incidentally passes through the invisible, magical tether, it severs it. Nutmeg falls to the ground, gasping and dying, when CinnamonLover (these are not their names in my books) passes close and the tether attaches to him.
The main reason to tell you this background has to do with her dress. When in the wild she thought about her appearance about as much as your average 2-or-3-year-old. Which is to say bright colors and accessories win the day and wild tangles mean nothing. She wore a dress of cobbled together leaves and moss that was constantly in disrepair, falling apart, and yet suited her in her wildness.
So when I started to look around (mostly on Etsy and eBay) for something suitable, much to my dismay I could find almost nothing and my budget had been shot for the month. Being a total amateur but at least partially possessed of moderate daily skills, I snuck a dark green dinner napkin that was more-or-less acceptable in color and texture. See, in the stories, the main character sets about making a skirt and top for Nutmeg, out of something more durable than leaves and moss. The cloth outfit delights the little sprite, being soft and flexible yet orders of magnitude more durable than her old dress.
This meant I had set my bar low. Very low. Low enough for even my pathetic skills. I mention in my first post for Nutmeg that I basically took the "hem" of the napkin, measured how long I wanted the "band" of the waist to be, then cut out leaf shapes from the napkin fabric, and used hot-glue to lay the pattern together. Using a little Velcro as fasteners, the skirt actually came together! The top was more difficult even though much less fabric. Again I used the hem to make a band, and I cut out basically a large oval. I cut the oval in half and brought the two flat "corners" together to overlap, hot-gluing them to make a "cup". Then I glued them to the band and used a little more Velcro to make the fastener again. Here's what everything looks like on the "inside":
- Nutmeg_0036_DressInsideSeam.jpg (191.05 KiB) Viewed 1671 times
Trying to attach them has been a puzzler for me. At first I thought I might make a very small incision in her back and attach them directly to her skeleton. The feedback on that option was generally negative, so I discarded it and I'm glad I did. Honestly I like being able to take the wings off when I want to. They're rather large.
I tried clear rubber bands to make it sort of like a backpack, but the wings are pretty heavy for that.
So I actually incorporated them right into the outfit.
I made a second "top" similar to the first, but instead of using the hem, I used some of the wider fabric. I got a hose clamp large enough to go all the way around Nutmeg's band size, and as "thin" as I could find it (wish I could have found thinner). I wove the wire ends of the wings into the metal of the clamp, and hot-glued everything down. Here are a few pics, I have more but they are basically redundant.
- Nutmeg_0097_WingCinchBuild.jpg (279.14 KiB) Viewed 1671 times
- Nutmeg_0101_WingCinchBuild.jpg (232.41 KiB) Viewed 1671 times
- Nutmeg_0102_WingCinchBuild.jpg (223.87 KiB) Viewed 1671 times
So, TBLeague 12" suntan large-breast doll with some generic head (Anung specified it in the Matrix but I don't know anything about it) and a home-made dress with self-attached wings. Though I did outsource the wings!
