My Growing Dollfie Family

Well I've asked around but nobody in our doll family seems to want to tell Misaki that her cat has died.

 

You have so many cute dolls! I love all of the poses and pictures!

We have some doll sized money now so we could afford another trip to London.

I took Ciel in this maid outfit. We bought it some time ago but I can't remember anybody wearing it before.

Our original mission was to take some photos around the Victorian parts of central London. But we got sidetracked and it all went a bit wrong. I took Ciel around the Tate Modern but it didn't right shooting any photos of her in there.

We did find some fantastic locations for future photoshoots on the other side of the river though. Eventually we did take some photos.

I used to pass this umbrella store on the bus. It's a very famous store and it's good to see it thriving. These days central London has lost so many interesting small stores and Soho is just full of restaurants now.

I was pleased with our choice of props today.

For some reason large doll in Victorian maid outfit wasn't that interesting to the public. We didn't really get noticed much at all.

One final photo. We didn't take a lot of photos. However we found a new astrology shop and bought a set of doll sized books and some small tarot cards.

We decided to take the group photo earlier this year so it coincided with Towa's 5th birthday. Towa was my first doll.

This kind of worked better in the planning stage than irl. Mostly I was too exhausted setting everyone up to take good photos. But anyway, here's the results.

They are arranged in order of their arrival data. Towa is in the white kitty nyan outfit. Fern was the last arrival.

I must say everybody was on their best behaviour. Only Reimu fell over. The initial plan was to line everybody up but I realised I wouldn't have enough room for that.

Mytyl is sitting because SD princess and so is Emilia because of boots.

Sakura Miku is on preorder. We ordered her on the first day so we'll be last to receive her lol.

From start: Towa, Uzuki, Kizuna AI, Misaki (DD-H-21 Mochi Ashi), Yayoi Takatsuki, Rena Ryugu, Asuna Titania, Kagamine Rin, Kirika Towa Alma, Kazuha (duplicate Kirika), Iori Minase, Mytyl (SDGr), Marisa Kirisame (MDD version), Yor Forger, Erica Fontaine, Shin Sato, Ciel, Kaito, Reimu Hakurkei (MDD version), Snek, Hana (DD-H-21 Mochi Ashi), Momo and Reina (MDD rescued from YJA "Junk" category), Kagamine Rin, Kagamine Len, Frieren, Miku NT, Megumin, Aqua, Anya, Rem, Ram, Emilia V2, Chisato, Takina, Fumika Fujisawa, Fern.

Spot the difference lol:

Early awards ceremony:

• Worst ever staining: Ciel (default Tsukihime outfit).
• Biggest celebrity moment: Hana for blowing them away with her kawaiiness at Dolly Day and making it onto the Volks blog. Runner up: Ciel being photographed by a tonne of curious tourists in Barcelona's gothic quarter.
• New arrival of the year: It has to be Fumika Sagisawa. Look at those eyes and that lucious black hair.
• Creepiest doll stereotype of the year: Asuna's visit to London in the Prayer Girl outfit. Several people still have recurrent nightmares after spotting her in my bag.
• Rising star award: It has to be Shin Sato. I've not seen her for sale anywhere.
• Coolest accessory: a tie between Ciel's handbag found in Barcelona and Misaki's Halloween eyes found in a £1.50 bag o' eyes in The Works.
• Longest in the same outfit: maybe Kaito because I still haven't found him something to wear. I did sit next to a Kaito in Barcelona and he had a great outfit.
• Best doll outing: It has to be Miku's trip to Hyper Japan London. That was an epic event and we made many doll friends that day.
• Best new things discovered from the doll hobby: I bought doll-sized tarot cards in a London magic shop for use in photoshoots. Just for fun I tried them out on humans (i.e. me). The first two readings have been incredibly spooky. I managed to pull out the same Major Arcana card twice in the same position. The first reading warned of dangerous times. They happened. The second reading presented three high number cards of the same suit, that totally described the problem. The final card presented the resolution. I am absolutely hooked. Runner up: I wanted some doll sized money and now appear to be collecting rare coins. 

Edited October 4 by Xiongmao

Huge congrats on the 5 year mark!  I love the setup you did in the number five for the photo, that is very cool!  I hope you continue on for another five years and beyond!   

 

Billy

On 10/4/2025 at 11:10 PM, baldylox said:

Huge congrats on the 5 year mark!  I love the setup you did in the number five for the photo, that is very cool!  I hope you continue on for another five years and beyond!   

 

Billy

Cheers! I planned it with Lego but the tail of the 5 went kind of wrong. I blamed Fumika and Fern for being too cute to not add to the collection. I think we'll do another one for 8. That's probably a lot easier.

New outfit time. We have a huge photoshoot planned for Sunday (with other doll owners) but I don't know if we'll wear this outfit. I could take Frieren, but she might complain about it being a not very interesting place. Fern's grounded until I 3D print her a hairpiece before the actual one gets broken.

This is Ciel btw - a truly underrated DD.

Ciel and Hana have been out and about again... this time with a few other doll enthusiasts.

Hana wore the Volks outfit we picked up at Dolly Day in Barcelona. She "borrowed" Misaki's shoes and Mytyl's bird cage. At the start of the shoot Hana had a fit and her leg fell off. Putting it back on when she's wearing a bodysuit is not a trivial operation 🙄.

We went to a vintage toy fair but sadly everything was pretty much out of our price range. We did spot a couple of MDD sized beds though, and a few other things that were the right scale.

In the afternoon we checked out Brompton Cemetery. It's an amazing place full of atmospheric places for taking photos, especially Halloween themed ones. Only one guy thought we were doing voodoo stuff, so that wasn't too bad really.

I like this photo - it looks as if Hana's wearing a cape.

Ciel being Ciel.

We're a bit behind in posting photos. I made my first ever doll outfit and last weekend Miku and I joined 20,000 humans and zero BJDs at London's MCM Comic Con.

Today it's Towa's 5th birthday. So exactly 5 years after she arrived I did a photoshoot of one of her first outfits. Five years on and I feel absolutely nothing has changed.

Apparently the kitty outfit is now a grail and maybe Towa will be also once she is retired as the DDdy standard model.

Happy Birthday Towa! 

And congratulations to five years in the hobby!

It never feels as if it has been that long already, if it weren't for the dolls multiplying as they tend to do... 😆

The girls have been out and about quite a bit lately.

Miku attended Comic Con at the Excel centre in London. There were 20,000 humans and zero BJDs. This outfit might have to be retired soon, because the shoes are looking a bit ragged.

Last weekend Reina and I stopped off at the British Museum on the way to a doll meet. There was a fancy dress competition at the doll meet but costumes had to be hand made. I can't sew, but I can wrap 16 metres of bandages around an MDD.

Strangely nobody asked us what we were doing in the museum, but one girl did show us some photos of her anime doll collection!

Here's Reina posing like an Egyptian. She came joint runner up in the fancy dress and won a Ken. So now we have 3 boy dolls.

And then there was the incident when Asuna fell into the sea 😲.

This was a setback, but the tribe will keep venturing out. There's a beach themed photo contest at next year's BJD Con and how can we not win when we live less than 100 metres from the sea?

Asuna is now safely dried out. I combed the sand out of her hair but the worst task was trying to dry out those yellow Wellington boots.

I find beach photography quite tricky. It's hard to get the exposure right and the photos always turn out looking way different to what my eyes saw. I'm hoping we get a weird freezing foggy day like the day my current Sony SLR arrived. Then we'll get some astounding photos.

Another strange week here. I'm now officially neurodiverse. The girls certainly helped with my diagnosis (I took Pureneemo Lycee along as proof of my special interests) 😁.

The weather has mostly been like you would expect the weather to be in England in November. However we did have two unbelievable late afternoon weather windows, so I took Shin Sato and Fumika out to terrify the local hoomans. I love Fumika's default outfit but she fell over the other day and I was horrified to find her hairpiece in two pieces 😬. Fortunately it turned out the pieces just clip together, and they had become separated. So now she's experimenting with other looks.

I'm still looking for a job so I can top up my pension buy more dolls. But it's looking increasingly likely that the Project Shin Sato Bot I launched last year has huge potential as a small business. It really came about as a way of justifying the purchase of the Re:Zero girls late last year. Shin Sato Bot's in a tough niche but our YouTube channel reached 50 subscribers this week. More importantly, we've been gaining one subscriber for every 12 views. That's way more than my girls' channel ever achieved. [for obvious licensing reasons it's not called Shin Sato Bot - that's just our codename for it].

Shin Sato cosplaying as a Lucky Star character (winter version). She knows how popular she is so she gets to wear what is arguably our best wig.

I took a lot of beach photos too but they're embargoed in case I decide to use one for the next BJD Con photo contest.

Fumika busking as a buffed version of Bocchi the Rock.

Unfortunately Fumika only made one coin, and that's not going to be enough to buy Sasara.

Prop trivia: the doll sized coin is an 1834 silver three half pence. They're a perfect scale for DD.

 

I took Ciel to the town I grew up in - Chichester in West Sussex, England. It's really not that exciting but I now realise it's absolutely amazing for doll photography. I don't know if they filmed any of Harry Potter here, but there's a definite Hogwarts vibe.

First up a homage to my late grandfather, who made this door for the Norman cathedral in the late 1980s. It's probably going to be good for 400 years or so. Sadly I didn't inherit the woodworking genes and ended up with an E for my woodwork secondary school exam. Chemistry was my special interest and I came first in the entire year during the mock exams 🧪.

I didn't realise sometimes the door opens to let hoomans out, but fortunately Ciel didn't topple inwards.

Ciel really is a genius. She stayed by my side for the long evenings last year when I was prototyping Shin Sato Bot. Now she's lecturing at magic school. She's been through a lot what with the Barcelona staining and Hana's antics at Dolly Day, but those eyes shine as bright as ever.

I'll return here with another doll in tow. Another great thing was nobody bothered us at all. Which is kind of rare in itself.