Plans March 8, 2008
Posted by claradolly in : Website , add a commentDollies! has been on hold for a few months while Alex and I attend to our other careers. Even though we’re not actively working on Dollies! regularly right now, we’re still thinking about and making plans for what the next steps will be for our project. Our childrens’ book submissions have been achingly slow, so we’ll most likely work on adding new and regularly changing features to the website. We’d like to make some animated shorts for each dolly, so that visitors to the site can get a better sense of each dolly’s personality. Between the two of us, we have a very solid and detail oriented sense for each of the dollies’ personalities, and it’s important to both of us that we’re able to express that more fully on the website.
Meanwhile, I’ve been dealing with DeQuervain’s Tenosynovitis in both of my wrists, which has unfortunately kept me away from the sewing machine for several months. We’re of course still taking orders for our online store, but I haven’t been able to re-stock new dollies for this reason. I’m gradually improving, but I have to be extremely cautious in terms of the kinds of activities I allow myself to engage in. I’m hoping by this summer I will have recovered enough to get back into things.
Holiday Sale/Grand Opening December 10, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Sales , add a commentThe past few days have been a whirlwind of events involving our dollies. On Saturday we headed down to the Providence Convention Center for the RISD Alumni Holiday Sale. This was our first time at the holiday sale, and there was definitely a huge difference in many different ways: being indoors was actually a nice luxury compared to the outdoor spring sale, and the crowd was definitely significantly larger as well. I was interested in what differences and similarities there were going to be between our experience with the spring sale and this holiday sale. Beep continued to be the bestseller, but this time around we had a wider range of dollies sell and in much larger quantities. I was also excited to see someone pick up Confused Penguin, one of our biggest dollies!
One woman who bought Alexdolly at the spring sale told me that she bought him intending to give him to someone else and that she just ended up keeping him instead. I had another person who came and bought Beep and then about an hour later stopped by to pick up Moomy as well.
We came home late Saturday night, exhausted from the sale and ready to launch the online store. The site was ready to go, it was just a matter of updating our inventory numbers to reflect what we sold at the sale. Since then, we’ve gotten several orders already which is great, and we’re looking forward to hopefully continuing to receive more!
Our Big Weekend December 6, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Sales , add a commentAlex and I are kicking everything into high gear this week in preparation for our two upcoming events: The RISD Alumni Holiday Sale on Saturday, and the grand opening of our online store on Sunday. At the holiday sale, we were able to add 7 new dollies to our inventory so we’ll have a wider selection of dollies available to purchase than the last sale. We’ll also be selling greeting cards and sticker books which just arrived in the mail the other day. Each sticker book has 90 stickers, and 45 designs which represent almost every dolly in our collection.
The online store is almost finished; Alex is working on putting buttons onto the store page tonight. We’ll open the store on Sunday so that we’re able to update our inventory after the sale happens. So lots of new exciting developments with our dollies, we’re enthusiastic to see where things will go!
Designs in the sticker books.
Greeting Cards December 1, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Sales , add a commentI’ve been busy this week getting the logistics set for the online store, as well as working on greeting cards for the Holiday Sale. We decided to print the cards ourselves, rather than have them printed elsewhere as we wanted to get as much variety as possible at the sale. The cards are simple, with small images centered in the middle of the card. We have so many drawings from the past that it was a simple matter of reformatting the images for the cards as well as cleaning them up to look neater. I ended up printing about 100 cards, with around 20 different images total.
Online Store Preparations November 21, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Sales , add a commentWe’re planning on launching the online store the day after the RISD Alumni Holiday Sale, (Dec. 9th) so I’ve been preoccupied over the past week making arrangements for that. A lot of the work right now involves the logistics of the business side, and also putting together the store section of the website. Because we have so many dollies, we’re going to start with a limited selection of dollies for sale on the online store. Gradually, we’ll build up our stock of the store so that eventually every dolly will be available for purchase.
In addition to the dollies on the online store, we’re also going to have a small section for dollies! merchandise including sticker books, greeting cards and other items as we expand.
Although opening the store is proving to be an immense amount of work, I’m pretty excited that it’s finally going to happen. I’ve had so many people ask me when the store was going to open, and I’m curious to see how it will help promote our series.
Clammy November 17, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Stuffed Dollies , add a commentI started work on Clammy this week and managed to finish up tonight. To our surprise, Clammy was one of the most requested dollies at the last RISD Alumni Sale, so I wanted to be sure that we were stocked up with him for the holiday sale. I wasn’t able to find the exact same shade of grey fleece from the first Clammy doll that I made, so I substituted it with a light grey fleece that I actually think I like more. Clammy’s pattern was very simple, but also tough to get just right. I wanted a shape that was almost a circle but just slightly more angular to show the shape of the shell better. The first Clammy I made was shaped too much like a triangle so the final pattern ended up being much rounder than I anticipated. To me Clammy is a funny dolly; he looks much more like a hamburger than a clam but maybe that’s why he’s so cute.
Stickers November 11, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Sales , add a commentAlex and I will be working this week on putting together sticker books and greeting cards for the Holiday Sale. The idea is to have alternative items for people so that we’re able to offer a wide selection of items at a range of prices. We’re going to draw from drawings that we’ve used in the past, but of course there’s plenty of work to be done in terms of getting all of the documents formatted correctly to be printed. The sticker books allow you up to 90 separate images, and so I think that we’re going to create 45 images so that each book has 2 each.
Inventory November 3, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Stuffed Dollies , add a commentThe RISD Alumni Holiday Sale is just about one month away, so I thought that a good task would be to take a closer look at our current and future inventory. We’d really like to be able to represent more of the entire Dollies! collection. Currently, we have these dollies in stock:
Smart Chicken, Lumpy, Eggy, Cyclops Baby, Monster Baby, Gremlin Baby, Patient Dolly, Impatient Dolly, Sensitive Dolly, Cabbage Monster, Bat Dollies, Bok Bok, Goo Goo, Moomy, Duckie, Mayonnaise, Bubble Gum, Bubba , Fish Claradolly, Claradolly, Alexdolly.
Over the next month, I’d like to stock these dollies for the sale:
Bee Claradolly, Bee Alexdolly, Beep, Fish Alexdolly, Confused Penguin, Caterpillar Claradolly, Caterpillar Alexdolly, Clammy.
So while that still leaves a large portion of the Dollies! collection unrepresented, it’s a big improvement from the last sale and addresses many of the dollies that people asked about at the last sale. Out of the list of dollies to make, most of them have been started already. The only ones that will be slightly challenging are the Caterpillar dollies since their shape is much more complex. Alex put together a new pattern for them a few weeks ago that we think is going to be much faster and more efficient to make.
Stuffing October 13, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Stuffed Dollies , add a commentI finally made a trip out to the fabric store to pick up bulk boxes of stuffing. I had gone through my stock of stuffing a while ago, so I’ve spent the past few weeks working exclusively on cutting parts and sewing them together. I have all of the parts for Confused Penguin, Duckie, Beep, Moomy, and Fish Claradolly lined up on a table in the studio, ready to be stuffed.
I go back and forth in terms of establishing specific sequences of tasks when I make the dollies. Many times it is certainly more efficient to group similar tasks together, but there is also the monotony that comes with repeating the same task over and over. At times I get impatient with the process and I move forward with a task even though I had planned to do all of the same tasks together. I suppose that’s my way of keeping the process varied enough to keep myself engaged. Although I will say that one of the most attractive parts of the process for me is how I’m able to turn my brain off and still stay completely immersed in what I’m doing.
Fish Dollies October 8, 2007
Posted by claradolly in : Stuffed Dollies , add a commentI’m redesigning Fish Alexdolly and Fish Claradolly to make them more simple and cohesive of a design. The fish dollies were originally made many years ago, and it’s been a while since I’ve thought about them. I think primarily the reason was because my brother has them at his apartment right now, so I haven’t spent too much time around them. (unlike the other dollies that live on my living room couch)
The original fish dollies are very large and they have 3-d fins and tails which I wanted to change. They just seem too bulky to be effective. So for the new designs, I’m scaling the bodies down a bit, and adding flat fins and tails with felt. I’m thinking about perhaps adding puffy paint to the fins and tails to give them a little more texture, as I think that the felt alone is perhaps not enough. The flatness of the felt also makes it easy to sew the fins and tails into the body piece making for an easier production process.
