Doll Experiment - Part 7

Doll torso

I did not post on Sunday.  With the holidays coming up I have been swamped.  Sometimes there is just too much going on to make time to blog.  I used to post twice a week every week, but that has been falling by the wayside for a while.  Sometimes I have to choose between blogging or crafting.  I generally choose crafting because if I don't craft something I have little to blog about. 

I am blogging today as I have managed to carve out some time in my studio (aka the spare bedroom).  Last blog post I showed that I was able to re-position the arms.  Today I will be blogging about the legs and weighting the doll in order to stand.  At least I have been working in that direction. 

I ended up making some extra work for myself.  If I had thought about it more I might have completed the task of the doll standing by now.  The doll that I used as a mold for the papier mache' did not stand on its own.  It used a doll stand.   Also, as I blogged in previous posts, I had changed the pose of the doll's arms, which shifted the weight on the front of the doll.  I wanted to weight the legs so the doll would be able to stand. 

Not thickness of the papier mache'.

The problem started when I made the cut on the torso.  I was thinking about weight in the legs and decided to cut the legs just where they met the torso in order to have the maximum amount of leg room for adding the weight.  If I had just decided to make the cut at the hip, I would have saved myself some work because the legs would have been one unit rather than two units. 

 Because I had to rejoin both legs it created extra work.  But that is not the only problem I created for myself.  I am getting ahead of myself here though so let me go on from weighting the legs and get back to what else went wrong. 

I weighted the legs using aquarium gravel.  Why aquarium gravel you might ask?  Well it is because I had some left over from another project in which the small bits of gravel made up part of a mosaic.  I had plenty left over.  Also, the gravel can be inexpensive compared to other items that can be used as weights.  A pound and a half of aquarium gravel  (0.68 kilograms) can from two dollars to twelve dollars a bag depending on features such as whether it is dyed or polished.  Two pounds of plastic pellets (0.91 kilograms) for stuffing toys can run sixteen dollars.  So gravel made sense in this case.

I filled the legs with gravel, covered the top of the area with tape and began the process of re-attaching the legs to the torso.  And that is when things started to go awry.  First off, the doll that was used as a mold for the papier mache' had a defect.  The porcelain legs were not attached evenly.  One leg was slightly longer than the other.  Since the original mold of the doll was cast as one piece, my doll had one leg slightly longer than the other.  That had to be addressed if I was ever going to be able to get the doll to stand on its own.  Furthermore, the tape that was added over top of the legs added to the unevenness in the legs.  The longer leg had to be shortened or the shorter leg had to be made longer.  To try to build up the short leg would mean that one foot was thicker than the other.  I decided to try to remove some of the length from the longer leg.

Maybe you can guess where this is going....  I took some length off the top of the longer leg.  I used a cutting blade with my rotary tool for this.  I did not remove enough.  I had to remove more.  I removed more and of course, it was too much.  So I ended up having to rebuild a section of the left leg.  It took a while.

After I filled the legs with gravel, their tops were taped with masking tape.  Then the legs were tapped to the torso.  Of course, there was a void in one leg where too much material had been removed.  The opening at the bottom of the torso was also taped with masking tape.  Between the two pieces of tape, a ball of aluminum foil was shaped to fit the area of the void and all that was covered with masking tape as well.   All of that was covered with multiple layers of papier mache'.  I allowed each layer to dry completely before adding a new layer.  

Each leg had to be added separately.  I tried to do both of them at once, but the legs kept shifting as I was trying to get them into position.  I finally gave up on that idea and added the legs one at a time.  As I said earlier in the post, if I had just removed the legs at the hip rather than at the base of the torso, it might have saved me some time, although I don't believe that I could have made the doll stand if I had not adjusted the length of the legs.  One foot would have looked much to thick.  Or conversely, I could have removed the shorter leg and added some length to it.  Well 20/20 hindsight is easy enough.  I wish I had considered it more before making those cuts.  However, I was in a very busy and did not think it through enough.  I will know better if I decide to try something like this again.

In the photo of the doll's leg filled with gravel, you can see the thickness of the papier mache'.  I only applied three layers to get it that thick.  Of course, when you are doing papier mache' each piece of paper  will overlap another piece so you are actually looking at double the original three layers.  

Anyway, the doll is back together at this point.  The balance is still a little off and I need to do a little work on that.  This is not the end of the papier mache' part of the process, but I will blog on what is coming next in my next post.