New hair - new image - new life

My friend Olga is a great doll player. She is a very serious and respectful lady, a doctor, and her apartment in St-Petersburg is full of beautiful dolls. Momoko, Tonner, collectible Barbies, special editions of different brands...

From her I learned a lot about dolls and how to play with them.  Enchanted by amazing doll world ladies spend time not only sewing new outfits and making photos of their dolls in graceful poses, they even reroot their hair, change their make up and tone of the body.

Thanks to her my two small helpers came to me. They are Tonner girls, 16" height, which is a little bit smaller than 1/4 human body. Particularly 1/4 was important for me because when I studied dressmaking and clothes constructing I was taught to make and to use test constructions 1/4 original size. So my dolls work as a small mannequins and exquisitely beautiful models for me. I even made a 'human' pattern for them. It is a great pleasure to dress them up.

DIY - school shoes for sensitive feet

Has anybody found it difficult to find plain black school shoes, textile and pretty open not to overheat small feet over summer? As for me I could not find a proper pair. There are lots of shoes but mostly they are made of thick and stiff leather. For sensitive or sore skin it can be a real trouble.

I failed to find soft textile shoes, plain black, with flexible sole,  size 11 (for some reason they start from size 12 or 13), so I did them myself.

I took these Emerson shoes you can find in every Target or BigW for $5 (sometimes even $3.5 on sale).  They are very soft, and sole is flexible, which is good. But they are really hard for five-year-old to put on due to wide elastic inserts.

Shoes as they were when I bought them. 

 First of all I took off the elastic inserts.

Insole is black and green on some photos - because I made two pairs of shoes, one with green and one with black insoles.  Some photos are of one pair, some of another.