Custom Blythe #4 Mona - The Entire Project

I've been told I'm fast at doing things. With my custom Blythe #4, Mona, I wanted to see, just how fast am I at this customizing stuffs. Mona arrived yesterday morning and as I'm on holiday and I had here all her parts and the tools I needed, I was able to start working on her immediately. I kept an eye on the clock and counted how long does it to take to customize a Blythe. I took quite long breaks in between, went jogging, chatted online, sat out on the terrace, fed the cats, had dinner and what-not, but I only counted the hours I actually spent working on her. So here's "The making of Mona", the project in one day! ;) Here's Mona, a factory dark tan black haired girl with a jointed body, before I started the customizing process.

Session 1: 1 h 15 min - took her apart - sanded face and back plates with 3 different sponges (3M superfine, ultrafine and microfine) - boggled eyes fix up Session 2: 1 h - carving (using knifes and diamond files with a dremel)

Session 3: 35 min - carving - final touches - one more sanding - cleaning off sanding dust Session 4: 30 min - removing 3 pairs of eye chips with the hot glue method (I wanted to keep one pair of her original eye chips. All the chips came out at first try.) Session 5: 1 h 10 min - body mods (modding the jointed body flat chested)

Session 6: 1h 15 min - face-up and eye lids (had some problems with the MSC can. The nozzle got partially blocked and I ended up with wet blotches on the girl's face, that I had to fix then... twice. So this took a bit longer than I'd expected) Session 7: 40 min - Installing new eye chips (SugarRay self-adhesive ones, super quick to install) - gaze correction - added a new pull cord for sleepy eyes - put the girl back together - added new pull charms

All in all, the entire process took 6 hours 25 minutes. Is that fast? I don't know. Maybe it is. I was trying to be as meticulous as I can at this skill level. The carving is still not perfect to my own eyes and had a couple of bumbs there in the road with MSC, but everything else went very smoothly. All the mechanical parts went like a breeze this time round. Anyways, here she is! Meet Mona!!! :D

The SugarRay eye chips from Brazil were really quite nice and easy to install. I bought 6 pairs, but got 3 pairs as gifts! That was very generous of them. I'll have to do a proper eye chip review post here one of these days...