The making of the Daisy Convention doll 2013

As soon as we knew the date for the convention, we had to start thinking about a convention doll as well.
Some voting was done, and finally the decision was Daisy wearing an evening dress. 
Well, that got my brain cracking, as I'm absolutely not that much of seamstress.
Luckily enough I know a couple of people who are brilliant at sewing, so I decided to ask Ingie if she felt up to sewing some special dress for the convention doll. She agreed and we decided on a dress made from ruby red raw silk, inspired on one of the later optimum dresses. 

We thought it would look nice to add a black lace shawl to it. 

Only few days later she had the outfits all ready to send! She's such a star!

Meanwhile I had found out that I had quite a couple of the same facetype doll that were all in need of a reroot. Chatting away on facebook I was wondering if it would be possible to use them for convo dolls.

Immediately Elaine jumped in and offered to help with the rerooting and she agreed to do 5 dolls in total.
after a little discussion she came up with the lovely colour Deep Cherry, which was what we used for the dolls.

Of course I knew I would never be able to reroot 10 more dolls in such a short time space, so I phoned Helene, who also kindly agreed to reroot 5 dolls. A little chat with Ingie and she promissed she would be able to do her own doll, so that left only 4 dolls for me to reroot.

Of course a convo doll wearing a ball gown, wouldn't be complete withouth jewellery and some fun accesory, so I contacted Vicky, who had also designed the jewellery for last years convention doll.
She came up with the idea to use gemstones for the necklaces. We finally decided on a black gemstone Ritz inspired choker. She also made up a lovely bracelet to go with it.

As fun accesory I was inspired by last years Pippa convention doll, who had a fan.
Of course I couldn't do the same fan, as Daisy is 3 inch taller than Pippa, but some research on the internet and I found a way to create fans for Daisy.

Now only a couple more things needed to be sorted; footwear and a box.

A quick email to Jonny, who's very talented in drawing and he agreed to do the box design again this year.

The last thing to figure was footwear. The dresses had already arrived and looking at them we decided black sandals would be the best combination, only problem was how to get enough black sandals in a short time.
searches on auction sites didn't help much, and inventarisation with other members of the convention doll team made it clear original black sandals were not possible.
So the only way to go was figuring how to paint other sandals withouth the paint peeling off.
I used some plastic primer and after that enamel paint. While I was working on the first one I saw my little box with ruby red beads and decided on the spot to ad beads to the straps of the sandals.

Of course the dolls needed a little haircut after rerooting, and some styling:

When everything came together and Jonny had a good idea what it all would look like, he designed the box.

I went to the printer with it, and my husband cut out and assembled the boxes. 

In the hotelroom Helene did the major part on dressing the dolls and putting them into their boxes.

Here's the final result: