Makies - A retrospective, because I can.

This month on Instagram there was a hashtag challenge inspired by the other "meet the maker/meet the whatever" tags. #maymeetthemakies. Organised by Sioux from Littlemoo, it was a great chance for Makie fans to get back together and start posting pictures again.
The community has been rather denuded and quiet since the final demise of Makielabs back in 2016.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind of emotions for me. Some massive nostelgia remembering the great feeling of a new doll and working on each and every character, but also some real lows remembering how nastily my involvement in the community turned toward the end when I was finally banned from the "official" group.
Some residual resentment and hurt boiled up thinking about them and how things went down, and a lot of regret and sadness.

But I love Makies, I always will.

They were a great idea, just sadly a little too ahead of their time, and marketed to totally the wrong audience (kids rather than adults with disposable income)

Maybe one day the idea of customisable completely one of the kind dolls will be more accessible, cheaper and more accepted by the toy industry.

Until then, I treasure each of my Makies and remember fondly the arrival and each and every one.

So that's what i'm gonna talk about today. it's my blog and i'll flog a dead horse if I wanna! HAH. (seriously i'm trying to cut back on buying new stuff so expect more retrospectives and vintage finds and such for a while)

This month as well as Maymeetthemakies on instagram I also did "a makie a day" on facebook. So here it is here too. I'm gonna do it in 3 installments. 1-10 now, 11-20 on the 20th and then at month end 20-31.. or 32... I have 32 dolls okay?
Because otherwise it won't load with all the photos. There's gonna be a LOT of photos. Prepare yourself, for the great Makies retrospective!


I can't remember when exactly I found out about Makielabs, but I do remember stumbling upon it, thinking it was a cool idea but being deterred by the high price (£99 at the time) and blank, white, sorta gormless faces they had.

This must have been back in 2012 when they first hit the media and started getting some attention as a cool new concept.

I didn't bite back then. I didn't think they were very cute and the price was scary (back then I thought £20 for a doll was expensive, oh ho ho how times have changed huh?)

Fast forward to 2015 and I stumbled upon Makies again, and their new "Cutie" faces. Better faces, better bodies, a range of skin tones AND a lower price, I was tempted. Still £69 was a lot of money for a toy, and it took me months of researching and umming and ahhing and playing with the maker, chatting in the forum and agonising over it before I finally took the plunge.

My first Makies were ordered as a trio, because I couldn't decide which one to make and the lab had a christmas deal where they were 20% off.
I'd saved enough for 2 dolls and some accessories but the 20% off deal meant that I could afford a third doll with what i'd saved up. SWEET.

And so my first three dolls came.

1st, 2nd, 3rd = Jian, Nate and Gabe.

The digital maker was so much fun to play with. I made so so many dolls I never made real heh.

Jian was ordered wearing Gabe's wig because the lab was too busy to switch wigs and it was the most expensive wig in my order, so I saved a few pounds having it come by default on Jian and swapping it out for the cheaper Ada wig she was supposed to wear. (bought separately)

Nate couldn't be ordered with his correct wig either due to the glitch making the boys unable to display anything other than fur wigs properly. It was christmas, they were too busy to make exceptions so I had to order a bunch of stuff separate to get them how I wanted. All in all it probably cost me as much as it would have without the special offer but oh well, it got me a lot of extra bits to use later hah.

My first group ended up being one of each dyed color available. Cool Caramel, Strawberry Milk and Cocoa Bean.

I missed out on Pistachio, a lovely green tone I wish i'd caught before it was discontinued. One day I will find a cutie era pistachio, apparently they're insanely rare though.

Over the years these dolls have changed a bit. Been given new faces, in Jian's case new hands (they're ballet hands and very dainty) and lots of changes of clothing. I always loved dressing dolls and my Makies have very extensive wardrobes.

Jian has stood up okay over time. She has a crack in one shoulder from a time I tried to force her into a dress that was a little too tight. Oops?
Sadly 3d printed nylon, while relatively strong, isn't as strong as the plastic of most fashion dolls.

Still, her arm doesn't seem to be loose. Gluing the crack seemed to stabilise it fine and i've not had a problem since.
She also has a cracked eye mech from when she first arrived, it holds her eyes ok, but it means i'm reluctant to take it out in case it breaks completely.

Her "no boys" shirt is a joke. Not a very good one I admit. See, Jian's gay, so when i saw the "no boys" shirt on a MGA 4ever best friends doll I KNEW she needed it, it's the sort of sense of humor I imagine she has.

Nate hasn't had as many changes of clothing. I knew how I wanted him to look from the start and being a ghost he can't exactly get changed anyway. He upgraded to a better waistcoat over the years, but beyond that he'd remained pretty close to how he was when I first dressed and styled him.

I don't know why I wanted him to have odd eyes, I just DID. And I can't imagine him any other way as a result.

Over the years he's greyed a bit, i'm not sure how much of that is the blushing I did back then and how much is actually the pink leeching out of his nylon. Maybe a little from column a and a little from column b. It works though, makes him look more ghostly.
He IS a pretty ghastly looking dude.

His wig drives me INSANE. I've never been sure which way around it's actually supposed to go, it's short in weird places and over long in others, it is either in his eyes or it's looking too sparse. I have no idea. Maybe one day i'll find a better made wig in this sort of style, but until then, he has to just tolerate a horrible and badly cut wig that falls off his head all the time.

Poor guy.

Gabe doesn't look right without his glasses, like, at all. You know when you know a person who has glasses and then one day they come in wearing contact lenses? it's like that.

His wig was the Makielabs "Bouncy" wig, a wig that's quite long but really crazy and curly so sticks out in every direction. I wanted Gabe to have an afro from the start, but none of the fro wigs I could find were quite right. They were all a bit too feminine, or worse, like a bad clown wig (eeek! NO!)
I mused that perhaps you could cut the rather dense bouncy wig to shape, and asked the labs but they weren't overly helpful saying they weren't sure.
I decided to try it myself, and sure enough, a few snips here and there created what I think is quite a wonderfully afro style wig for my boy. It's big, it's bouncy, it's dense but it's also a nice shape. Not too round, not too tall and not too halo-like (which always looks a bit feminine I think)
He just isn't Gabe without his wonderful afro hair.

I also loved that Makielabs let you ask for pierced ears on boy dolls. So Gabe has pierced ears, just perfect for the little black "gauges" that came with a punk Bratz doll. 


4th:

Of course, after this I was bitten by the Makies bug, and I wanted MORE MORE MORE BWHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem.

So soon after the first three arrived I got Christmas money and bought Zhi and Lidara.

They arrived within days of one another.

Lidara arrived first, a cute Strawberry elf girl. 

Lidara's skin tone has remained rather pink over the years, so I think Nate's dye job was just a bit iffy. He was always more yellow and pale than my other Strawberry Makies.

Lidara was my first with maxed out elf ears, ooo maxed elf ears man, they're awesome. I couldn't resist them.

It took so much restraint not to give every doll elf ears! lol.

Lidara's wig was always over long, like, past her feet long. I have no idea if it was SUPPOSED to be this long, every subsequent wig of this style i've seen has been a lot shorter so I assume it was an error.
In fact my BJD Lyric wears the same style of wig in the same colour:

Now she's a much taller doll, but even so, her wig is about half the length of Lidara's

it's weird.

I considered trimming it but it seemed a shame, there was something very "elf-like" about ridiculous Rapunzel hair I felt.

Lidara used to have gems on her glasses, they fell off. I need to replace them.

Jian and Lidara are a couple in my little world, and a dang cute couple I think they make too.

5th: 

Zhi, Jian's brother arrived 3 days later.

The lab was being odd and again, because it was busy, they couldn't swap his wig out for me. So instead they sent me his wig on a spare head cap. It was something they were testing out to make wig changes easier.

To their credit though, the wig WAS free.

Zhi was ordered with a gift card, which frustratingly arrived without a code inside the box (Someone had pilfered them apparently)
The Lab sent me a new code which was good of them.
The free wig was a "sorry" I think.

The Cutie boys really didn't have many clothing options. The older Makies, the Classics came with a lot of neutral pieces but the Cuties had set outfits and the boys were limited to three.

The Sk8 set wasn't overly masculine, with a red lycra shirt, tight black leggings and little slip on shoes.
Kinda... feminine if you ask me.

At the time the other two sets featured a proper cotton striped tee with cotton shorts and a minecraft print shirt and shorts where the top was made from this really stiff fabric. Eventually they switched that over to the weird printable stretch fabric too.

I honestly don't use much of the Makie labs clothing, aside from the leggings for girls. The shirts are all a bit too shiny to look that good to my eye. They have cute prints, but they just look... cheap.

6th:

Fizz was a bit of an impulse order. She popped into my brain and refused to leave, insisting I had to get her printed before anyone else.

So I obliged.

At this point I was well and truly addicted, oops?

She shipped out on a friday night, meaning I didn't expect her to come until monday. DHL surprised me by turning up on a SUNDAY of all days with a Makie tube.

She was a much yellower shade of brown than my other cocoa Makie.

I love dressing this girl, she has such a crazy dress sense. All my dolls have a specific LOOK that I associate with them, so much so they just don't look themselves in anything else. Fizz' look is "I rolled outta bed, grabbed whatever was clean and make clashing colours and patterns look GOOD" lol.

Incidentally, her wig is called "fizz" too. It was too perfect.

Makie labs earrings look cool but they're a pain, they don't actually clip into the ear holes very well. They're designed so they can be worn by dolls without holes in their ears but they don't clamp very tight and just fall off a lot. Fizz has pierced ears, but even so, her earrings fall off all the damn time. Boo.

She's a photographer, and has a small collection of various doll cameras.

7th and 8th:

 My first secondhand Makies and my first classics.

Girl classic heads are SO HUGE lol.

This pair were an ebay find, BIN for the pair.

Now, from what the seller told me, and ex staff have remembered, these two were a custom job. They were made for a photoshoot and are supposed to be Posh and Becks. Both got custom made outfits and Becks got a custom made wig that was apparently a pain in the butt to do.

Both were painted by Sioux from Littlemoo, who used to work for Makielabs.

Of course, I couldn't give two hoots about Posh OR Becks. I mean, I like the Spice Girls as much as any girl who grew up in the 90s, but not enough to want celeb dolls of one of them.

But Vicky had a beautiful face, full of sass and surprisingly pretty for a classic Makie (Sioux works magic seriously) so with a quick wig swap she became Vicky. 

My punky, snarky, not overly polite girl.

And because Husband couldn't unsee it and now neither can I, Becks became John Constantine. lol.

9th:

My 9th Makie was this fella. A Made For You Makie.

These were premade, boxed and ready to go dolls sold in Selfridges and Hamleys originally, a sort of instant gratification Makie if you will. They were all unique, having been designed by the lab themselves and printed as one offs, and a fair few came in outfits unique to the MFY line.

Boys were VERY rare. Almost all of them were girls. In fact I only know of maybe 6 mfy boys, at all, out of the hundreds they made. Scary huh?

Anyway, the concept always struck me as a bit odd. They were the same price as regular Makies, why buy a premade one when you could pay the same and get one custom made just the way you wanted it?

But then I saw this guy...

He was on Amazon of all places, they'd gotten a small number in to test the market I suppose.

I instantly fell in love with him. Not just because he was a boy (though let's face it, I love boy dolls) but because he had such a dang cute face and was so different to anything I was designing with the maker tool.

And so I finally came to understand the appeal of the MFY line. It was a line of unique dolls designed by someone else, someone who went for options you hadn't considered, who came in with a fresh pair of eyes and make something really unique and unusual.
because as i'm sure most Makie people know, there are certain traits our own custom made Makies share, certain features we found most attractive and kept going back to.
Like a different artist, the MFY dolls were just a bit different to what I was making and I found some of them quite inspiring.

Now, in this guy's case, due to an error with Amazon's listing they listed him as "2 available", which prompted a discussion about whether there were twins or two similar looking boys, or just a mistake.
I didn't want to risk it, and I was curious too.
I sort of thought the most likely option was that they'd been sent two boys in the same outfit with the same wig and mistakenly assumed they were identical. Or that the system had borked.

I wanted THIS exact doll, so i had to order both to make sure I got him right?
Plus i was super curious what this mystery other doll looked like. If he even existed.

As it turned out, it was a listing error. So the Amazon packer packed my doll and decided to substitute, something Amazon isn't supposed to do (Seriously I messaged them and asked prior to ordering. I specifically said "if you only have one, will they send something else or just refund me?" and was ASSURED they never substituted and i'd be instantly refunded!) Instead I got a gift card for Makie labs. And I mean I can see why they did it, it was good for "one doll" and I wanted "one doll" but it wasn't what I was told would happen and I wasn't really budgeting for two dolls really (i expected them honestly to tell me it was a mistake and refund me). I was pretty peeved they hadn't just refunded me.

But returning the card was a pain, so I hung onto it with the reasoning "i'll use it at some point."
I knew I was so far down the rabbit hole I was NOT getting out.

But it did piss me off the way Amazon handled it. Like COME ON guys, you lied to me! not cool.

Anyway, August as I named him (Don't ask why, I haven't a clue) came in the same silly outfit Zhi came in which wasn't him AT ALL.

It's amazing the difference a wig and a decent costume makes.

This is August, my mad biochemist.

But of course, now I was CONVINCED August was supposed to have a twin.

and not 2 weeks later Makielabs posted up some MORE MFY Makies in their webstore.

10th

The lab posted up a bunch of mfy makies including 4 boys (soooo rare) and of course, I was interested. Heck, I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket

And there he was, the most adorable worried looking boy.

Same wig, same outfit, same skin tone as August. it was fate! It was meant to be! Also he totally had ginger eyebrows, look at that! Clearly he's supposed to be ginger!

I used my gift card.

And waited...

The lab sent me a box, I eagerly opened it... but alas, it contained the WRONG DOLL.

I was devastated and sent them a panicked email.
they emailed me back to reassure me my boy was on their desk and safe and hadn't been sent elsewhere and they were sorry. I was told to return the boy they'd posted and they'd post my correct doll.
So i did, and the next day Ig arrived at last.

I still think he was just trying to get out of a family reunion, the jerk.

A wig and eye change and he was just perfect, he still IS perfect. I love this little guy.

..... stay tuned, there's a whole lot MORE to come.