Makies pt 2

Next 10, oh yeah.

So last time I talked about getting started into the obsession, this time i'm waaaay down that rabbit hole and i've got no hope of coming back up again lol.

I had 10 Makies now, and not a lot else was being released that interested me. So what does one do when they have a small wad of cash and nothing else to buy? you got it, buy a load of Makies.

Especially when the lab kept putting on sales!


So we're up to April 2015 at this point. in 6 months i've managed to snag 10 Makies, which is.. a lot of Makies.
But I wasn't done. Oh no, I had many more in my account I wanted to make real. It was just a case of who, and when.

Then the lab had another sale.

Now, they'd recently released some "limited edition" Makies, two premade girls who were printed in batches of a few hundred (if not more) each. So they weren't unique or one of the kind, but dang they were cute AND they were cheaper than a custom printed Makie.
With the sale in fact, they were only £30, and that was too great a deal to pass up.

Rebecca and Juniper were their names. Rebecca had slightly pointy ears but honestly her pink dress and blonde hair put me off. She just... felt so generically "made for girls", sort of a design by numbers safe sort of doll. Granted I could have OOAKed her into something awesome but she didn't scream "buy me" like Juniper did. Juniper was a dark skinned doll (one of my weaknesses) with auburn curls (omg yes) and she was just stinking cute.
For £30 I could definitely justify her.

The advantage of the premade Makies was that they shipped out within 24 hours and arrived within a few days heh, instant gratification was a great way to scratch the Makie itch (so to speak)

June, or Juniper to give her her full name is a cocoa bean Makie with a at the time new wig, black eyes and a cute minecraft dress.

Her lips were thankfully not as crazy vivid as her promo images hahah.

I restyled her hair into a sort of fro hawk thing and gave her a pair of glasses i'd gotten at the same time (they released glasses packs for a great price and I can never resist doll glasses, I adore them!)
I also made her eyes as an experiment. They're Makie labs green eyes (i think?) but I took a sharp spike to them and removed the white backing to access the iris, I then painted the whole back brown instead, to see what would happen. And the result was, HAZEL EYES! WHOO!
It was possible to carefully remove the iris paint if you wanted to, but it was time consuming and better to just buy blank eyes to use instead.

I was taken by how similar to my Makie Fizz she looked. Same round cheeks, same big eyes. I decided they were sisters.

But i'd also been saving to buy August and Ig's brother so with 25% off, I had enough to order Cass too.

Cass was a challenge. Because I couldn't get the idea of August having a twin out of my head, an identical twin, I wanted to order a doll who looked just like him. Now, the easy option would be to give the lab the code from inside his head which their system apparently could translate into a doll, but that'd give me an exact clone, not a twin. I wanted Cass to have a different expression.

I never can do things the easy way can I?

So, holding August up to my screen I carefully tweaked features till I had this:

Nervous, I sent him to print.

and waited...

I ordered him with red hair from the start, and brown eyes in the cool caramel skin tone. And because i'm mean, and thought it was hilarious, I ordered him wearing a lab outfit I didn't already own... which was pink... and adorable ahahaha.
The lab didn't question me, they just dressed him like this.

He also came with a pair of clip on red trainers/sneakers, which you remove the foot to put on. Random. better than the slipons for boys though. 

Poor Cass.

This is how he was supposed to be dressed, the cutsie outfit was for the girls to fight over.

Cass is a space ranger, or something. He hangs out with an alien bounty hunter.

And here he is alongside his brother August. They're pretty close I think. Same sort of nose, same wide mouth, same shaped eyes. Different eyebrows and expressions to differentiate them.

And so the Tierney triplets were together at last! WHOO.

About a week after I ordered Cass I scraped together enough to take advantage of the sale and order his companion/boss.

Sa'dii was Makie 13, and as a result I wanted a name to reflect that (I like the number 13 okay?). So I ran 13 through various translators till I found one I liked. Khuda Sadi, which is Oromo for Thirteen.
I liked it, but it needed some "alienification", so she became Khuda Sa'dii, or Sa'dii for short.

I maxed out a lot of the sliders and minimised many more in an attempt to get her as non human looking as possible. The end result was a sort of feline humanoid i think, and she's beautiful.

Her dress was another disappointing printed outfit that looked way better in the maker than in real life. Printed on collars, eugh.
The moustache print is cute though. too cute for a intergalactic bounty hunter though.

Her wig was too long for a proper bob, so I cut it to better match the maker.

She also got a blue faceup and these incredible black sclera eyes.

Sometimes she likes to dress more casually too.

She was my first stark white Makie and wow they're stark white. Like paper white. It was a bit of a challenge to paint.

At the end of May was our 6th wedding anniversary, Husband and I decided to be silly and declare it our "3d printed doll anniversary" lol. So we ordered dolls of two of our characters, birthed from a silly conversation about stuper powers while we were in Paris.

They arrived naked, because we ordered them with brand new outfits that the lab hadn't quiiiite finished making yet.

It was kinda hilarious.

Cat's super power is that she can shrink, which is a perfectly useful super power. Harris on the other hand has the power of "spontaneous group song and dance number" which means he basically lives inside a musical, and periodically those around him start to sing and engage in choreographed dances in the background. He hates musicals, he hates his life, he's generally just really dang miserable.

I made his eyebrows as angry as possible lol.

Now this was all fine and dandy, I had a few Makies planned but was saving up again to afford them, when the lab dropped a bombshell on us all.
they were discontinuing "Ice Frosting" (the white) Makies completely.

We had a little time to order any white Makies we wanted and then that'd be it.

Everyone panicked.

See, the white ones had a huge advantage in that they were the easiest to dye. Nobody had really at the time done any experiments on dying any of the predyed Makies, but the white ones, being pure virgin nylon, took dye beautifully without having to factor in any other colour beneath.
Anyone who wanted Makies to dye would have to order them NOW, and any who wanted a white makie that would remain white this would be the last chance too.

EEEEK

So I hastily put in an order for two Makies to dye, a plan i'd been toying with for a while. Nothing like the threat of not being able to do something to light a fire under your butt huh?

 Moniker and Alias, named because I was feeling silly.

Moniker I planned to be blue. Alias would be green. I love green.

I ordered them without their wigs attached so they'd be easier to dye (no glue residue)

First step, rinse off the parts to make sure they're good and clean and ready.

Sadly when I took Alias apart his eye mechanism broke. Bah. This was the first of a series of problems i'd have with Makies after this point *sigh* I think they started using slightly less nylon to save money or something, the dolls became far more fragile. It was a huge bummer.

I call this "makie soup"

While I decided what to do with Alias' broken mech, I dyed Moniker first.

I used Rit for these two, which isn't easy to find in the UK. I had to order it online.

After only a few minutes Moniker turned an amazing bright blue colour.

Rinsed off, dried and sealed, she got new eyes I had from when I ordered Sa'dii's eyes, hacked her wig into a weird style and did her face.

Several years on, she's still just as blue as ever.

I decided I didn't want to wait another 2 weeks so I dyed him too, glued his eye mech and hoped for the best.

I cut his fur wig too, short at the sides.

he was SUPPOSED to be Kelly Green, he ended up teal.
Not what a planned, but it's a gorgeous colour.

Such a cool pair.

And he's still such a pretty vivid colour.

Problem was, having dyed two dolls, now I wanted MORE.

While I agonised over that, and how to get the money together in time, I also ordered Sa'dii's brother Tor, because as husband put it "you'll regret it if you don't."

Again I maxed out sliders, giving him a cat-like nose and angled eyes.

Again I ordered him in a girl outfit just to get a hold of it. No sense getting hundreds of the same 3 boy outfits after all. Not while there was still a wide range of other outfits.

Like all Lab outfits, it was stretchy material and i've honestly seldom used it.

He also came with a hairclip which absolutely cracked me up. First doll with a hairclip and it's a boy! ahahahah.

But damn what a pretty boy.

He got done up like his sister, given some weapons and was ready to go.

He's a space pirate. Sa'dii says that just because he's family doesn't mean she's not gonna bring him in.

I named him Khuda Torba, or "Seventeen" (he was my 17th Makie)

Unlike Sa'dii I didn't order him special eyes, I just painted some default Makie lab eyes lol. It was supposed to be temporary but I never got around to ordering the proper ones and they still look fine years later.

Just like Alias, his eye mech snapped as soon as I tried to remove it. *sigh*

Finally, before the white Makies were gone for good, I scraped together enough to order 2 more dolls. One to dye purple and one to try once again to dye green.

Nhaj was created with the intention of being bright green, and one of Tor's crew. Pseudonym was another Kobold, to be dyed purple.

This time I tried Idye Poly, which was supposed to be better than Rit on synthetics.

And so it began. For the record, Idye STINKS to high heaven. LIke man, it's SO STINKY. Bletch.

I threw a bunch of stuff in the pot with the doll including dip dying a wig lol.

She came out a beautiful vivid purple.

I made her a wig from yarn too. So pretty, so purple.

Nhaj on the other hand, didn't come out at all like I intended.

First dip he turned bluish like Alias had. So I dunked him again hoping for more green.

He came out well... very dark. Almost a Jade colour really.

NOT Kelly Green

THIS is Kelly green damnit.

Now at the time I assumed either the dye in the pack was actually emerald and mislabelled, or i'd just done it wrong. The dye in the pan didn't look at all like the colour on the packaging even when I first opened it so it wasn't a case of dying nylon different, it just wasn't the bright green I thought it'd be.

He didn't end up the colour I wanted, but still kinda cool right?

But here's the even STRANGER thing here.

Over the years Nhaj has sat on a shelf with all my other Makies, quietly collecting dust but out of sunlight and away from extreme temperatures.

ALL the others have remained the colour they originally were, not even any fading.

Nhaj.. well... this is weird.

When I got him down to take photos today I didn't initially notice because in the dim natural light his skin tone is so dark it's hard to really make much out. But as I got him into direct sunlight I noticed he seemed a bit.. over blushed.
I wondered if maybe i'd been a bit over zealous when I blushed his face at some point, but I couldn't remember blushing it pink.

Then I noticed his hands were pink too, and I NEVER blush hands.

So i stripped him off.

He's turned a sort of purple colour! Wth?

There are blotches still of the dark green (the photographs really favour the pink) but he's blotchy all over with this incredible plum tone.

His back is genuinely PURPLE, particularly the back plate.

In fact the only bits of him still properly green are the bits of his headcap that had glue on them (to hold his wig on) and his eye mech.

It's like the dye oxidised, but... how?

It's a really cool effect because it's so organic, there's lighter parts, darker parts, an incredible mix of deep green and this quite strange oxidised purple colour, but how on earth has this happened!?

Even his FEET which were inside shoes have turned purple! Even the inside of his head!

Wtf?

Any chemists out there who can explain this oddness?

I mean i'm not upset by it, I think it's kinda awesome and for this character, who is supposed to be a race who have a sort of crystaline outer skin, it actually works really well, but it's bizarre and i'd be so upset if any of the others started to do this.

Was this dye just bad from the start? I did nothing different in the dye process with this doll. he was rinsed, dyed, dried and fully sealed after... it's so bewildering and bizarre!

So yeah, Nhaj is now purple...

uh.. go figure?

And on that note, I leave you for the time being. The final lot will be covered next time, along with the demise of Makie labs and all that drama.