American Horror Story: Barbie Coven

Yeah, okay, so maybe that doesn't really strike horror into most hearts, but have you ever stared into the vacant, vapid, blank stare of a Barbie doll for very long? Terrifying...

"A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her,
because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her."
-- Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

A n y w a y... yesterday, I was working on something else which led to me deciding to finally fix the spooky tree that was sitting on the witch doll shelf in the guest room (before it fell over, taking half the dolls with it). I had to dismantle the base, remove the guts, re"stuff" it with a thick dowel leftover from something else and reglue it all. Then I had to repair the paint that got messed up because it's made of pipe cleaners, masking tape and paper, and some of the paint flaked (surprisingly little!). While I was at it, I added some lichen-y and mossy greens to the roots and knothole. It gave it quite a bit more dimension, I think.

Round about the cauldron go; / In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone / Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,  / Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

I mentioned on Twitter that I was trying to tie this collection to some of the other things in the room, to make the room cohesive. The guest bedroom is currently an odd mix of children's library (it's adjacent to our daughter's room, so the logical place for kid's books after we ran out of room in the library downstairs), some memorabilia and art from New Orleans/Mardi Gras, and witches.

After I put up the shelf holds all the dolls, I had decided it would be cool to tie them to New Orleans by printing out a background of family crypts*, as if they were all meeting in a New Orleans cemetery. So that's what I did yesterday, printing out some altered photos on cardstock, then gluing them to foamcore. The idea is that they look like they're a bit in the distance, so the detail isn't sharp on purpose. I wanted the concept of the crypts without the images themselves fighting for prominence on the shelf. Unfortunately, the shelf is so crowded that now you can't hardly see the crypts at all. ::sigh:: (The one to the left of the tree is alleged to be Marie Laveau's true resting place. Of course, I had to include the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans!)

Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hekate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna

I do have a solution to the crowded shelf problem, however. There is room above the headboard on the opposite wall for another shelf, and I do have another identical shelf waiting to be put up. I'm mostly waiting for more dolls to justify the trouble. I might need to find a new home for my old promo print of Bugs and Witch Hazel, though.

Witch Hazel: I warn you, dearie, I'm going to worm all your ugly secrets out of you. Tell me. Who undoes your hair?
Bugs Bunny: Do you like it?
Hazel: Like it? It's absolutely hideous!
Bugs: I did myself up tonight.
Hazel: There's nothing like a home permanent.
Broom-Stick Bunny, 1956

Flanking the bed are the taller bookcases, and more random doll assortments.

L-R: 2003 Halloween Fortune (Target excl.), 2000 85th Birthday Halloween ed. Raggedy Ann,
2004 Boo-tiful Halloween

Top: 1997 FAO Schwarz excl. Samantha Stephens Bewitched (Exclusive Premiere)
Middle: (mostly hidden behind the plush dragon) 1972 Emerald the Enchanting Witch (Milton Bradley)
Bottom L-R: Disney Store Evil Queen, 2010 Bewitched Barbie, Disney Store Maleficent
Right: three Mardi Gras prints from NOLA artist Mousie
(clockwise from top, 2001 "Mardi Gras Moon Goddess", 1998 "Perfume", 2000 "Mardi Gras Eyes")

The shelf with the little plush dragon (Leviathan, to be specific, he was a parade throw) and Emerald (who is sadly nekkid) holds my modest collection of modern and vintage witchy kids books. I've written one of my own that I'm still in process of working out the illustrations for, and writing a second.

Then there's one of my recent acquisitions, and the source of much frustration for Jill Thompson, who worked for years to bring her to life: the Scary Godmother doll. She was a Kickstarter project (my husband backed it for me, and I even got to meet Ms. Thompson, who is lovely) and I was thrilled when she finally arrived. I don't plan on taking her out of the box until I have a dome to put her under.

"Here's a treat that's fun to make and helps you get a word in edgewise. Take two of your favorite crackers, spread one with jam, one with peanut butter, smoosh them together, and jam them into the mouth of a chattering werewolf."

Next to her on the shelf is a little experimental doll I made. Above the shelf on the wall is a collection of doubloons from my collection, and a drape of beads attached to the frame below it. I had a brief, mad obsession with doubloons and their history, and have a big 3-ring binder full of them, carefully sorted by year and put in little cardboard/mylar coin folders.

Finally, the last part of the collection in this room sort of serves as a warning, and is a souvenir from Salem, Massachusetts, so I suppose it's not all New Orleans...

By the way, in Colonies, they hanged "convicted" witches. Burning is what they did in Europe.

Resources
If you're a witchy sort of collector, too, here's a fantastic resource for the Barbie Halloween dolls:
http://www.fashion-doll-guide.com/Halloween-Barbie-Dolls.html
For more witchy children's books, visit A Mighty Girl's blog:
https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10117 "With Broomstick in Hand, 40 Books Starring Mighty Witches"
...and Red Tricycle's "Which Witch is Your Favorite? 14 Witch Books We Love":
http://redtri.com/witch-books-for-kids/
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*If you are unfamiliar, many burials in New Orleans are aboveground, because NOLA is below the water table. Any coffins that are buried have ledger stones to keep them down, or have stone walls around the coffin to keep out rising water. More info about those: http://liverytours.com/2014/10/new-orleans-cemeteries-and-graves/.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Collecting

Collections require some care and maintenance or else they're just hoards. If they aren't organized in such a way that they can be enjoyed or pieces found easily, you're in danger of being one of Those People they turn into zoo attractions on reality television. In our old house, we were pretty cramped but still had stuff, so it was pretty borderline there for a while. Now that we have the space to organize and display the things we love, there's the responsibility to maintain it. Since I'm the one who's home all day, and I'm the one who's a little obsessively completist, that task falls to me.

For the action figures, I maintain an inventory at DASH, which is more than just a database, there's also the ability to buy/sell/trade (I haven't done any of that myself, however). Sometimes I have to add a figure myself if no one else has yet, like the Justice League War Wonder Woman I got yesterday, so there are a few figures in my collection that aren't in the inventory database because I haven't added them yet. It's imperfect, but it's the best thing I've found so far.

For the libraries (main and children's*), I keep track of our collection with LibraryThing, which is an online database. It took a few months for me to get all the books put in (over three thousand), so now a trip to the bookstore means books go to my desk for entry first.

For the comic books, I purchased Comic Collector, from Collectorz.com, which also has an app (not a stand-alone app, you have to have purchased the program first!) that runs on my phone so I can double-check the collection when I'm rummaging in the old comics bins. They have various versions to suit your needs, it runs on Macs or Windows computers, and I love it. The same company also has inventory software for games, music, movies and books. They run sales every once in a while, and it's tempting to get some of the others, but I have covered, our movie collection that extensive, and our music is just weird... Anyway, new comics are dealt with the same way new books are dealt with: they go to my desk first and are entered into the database, and then they are read.

Once all this reading material has been dutifully entered into the computer, it gets read, or goes into a pile to-be-read. Read books often end up in piles in the library, to-be-shelved. Read comics go into a box to be bagged, then once bagged into a box to be taken downstairs to be filed with the others. Since I am the one who's home, once again I am the sensible choice for being the one to shelve and file, put away and straighten... and I hate that part.

Right now, I am procrastinating from doing the laundry. I don't actually mind the sorting/washing/drying part. I loathe the folding/putting away part. And socks. I bloody well hate socks. So laundry goes upstairs to be folded on the guest bed, where it usually sits in a wrinkled heap until I guilt myself into dealing with it... usually about the time I have to do laundry again.

Months ago, I organized our comics. I got all of them entered into the database, put them all in order, put out a few accidental duplicates that I found, left room in the boxes for new comics to be filed... and since then, have taken down new comic, laid them on top of the lids of those boxes, or taken them down in other boxes and just left them there, waiting to be filed. *sigh* I hate filing. I don't mind data-entry, but filing is awful.

Part of the issue (ha!) is that when I take the boxes off the bottom shelves, I'm going to cause an action figure avalanche. Then I'm going to cause another one when I put them back. Every. Time. Having the boxes on the bottom shelves of the figure display is awesome, because the bottom shelf is no good for display (plus dog temptation risk), but I suspect that once I take all the comics we have right now and file them, we're going to have full boxes, with no room for more. That means a new home is needed, and soon. But that's a task to procrastinate another day...


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* We turned the formal living room into a library, but there was no room for children's books. We bought a bunch of bookcases for the guest room, adjacent to our daughter's room, and put the kids books there.

So Much to Do!

My basement is a mess. It's making my brain kinda messy, too. I have packaged figures I need to photograph and get on the shelves, comic books that need to be boxed, art to frame, and a wall to paint. I've been working on the basement in fits and starts since August '12, and I just can't stand it. I have so many things I want to do with the space, and can't because it's a mess.

My goal right now is to get the clutter taken care of so that by this summer, I can paint the wall. Once that's done, I will have more time to devote to the curation of the collection, and of the list of heroines. I have so much I want to do with that...

I bought my pass for Geek Girl Con in October, and I'm trying to talk a friend into making a trip down from Ontario so we can go to G-Fest in July. The end of June is my target date to get the basement "done." (It will never be completely done; there will always be something that needs doing.)

I have a pretty clear goal, less clear solutions for reaching it, and a headache that is getting in my way. C'est la vie, non? Le sigh.

Another motivation for getting it done once and for all? I promised myself a "geek tree" once the basement was clutter-free. I even put all the geeky ornaments in a separate box when I put everything away earlier this month. And so many ideas for geeky ornaments to make... I am a woman on a mission, and just as soon as the painkillers do their job, I am on it! (But until then, I think it's gonna be me, on the couch, with a notebook making lists...)

Ambitious Project

I've been mulling in my brain a way to identify all of the figures in the basement in a way that is unobtrusive but still visible. The first thing I considered is the simplest: little cardstock "table tents," nothing but the name. Alas, my handwriting is wretched, and I'd have to make hundreds of these; the last one would be illegible. So if I printed them with the label maker, they'd be legible and I could make the text narrower to take up less space.

 Options #1 and #2

I would love to include the first appearance info with the name. Maybe with the cover image...

Options #3 and #4 -- Finally! An appropriate use for Comic Sans!

Of the two, I like the one on the right with the cover image the best, but that's getting kinda big. The cover is only 2 inches high and too small to read details, but it is nifty to have that there. Cover only?

Option #5

Sort of minimalist. I reduced the size to an inch and a half, so it's really hard to read. I do like this minimal approach, but it's too hard to see the cover info, even if I took it back up to 2 inches. Plus, not all of the figures are from comic books, so I'd need to find something like DVD covers to use for those, and that still leaves a few out. How would I use this method for the Jungle Girl Bettie Page?

Another issue, possibly the most important is that cardstock is light, and apt to blow around making it really hard to keep the right label with the figures. Using a small base, sort of like I did with the cover above, but longer and flatter, then I could go with the third option which has the cool info even if it doesn't have the cover.

No matter how I decide to do this, it's going to be a fabulous amount of work. There are 359 figures in my collection currently, most of them are displayed. (Six of them were purchased during my Canadian Spring Break. Woo-hoo!) That's a lotta labeling...

Wonder Woman Shadow Box

Cross-posted on Creative Miscellany.

The other day, I saw a small shadow box at Homegoods. It was about 8 inches square (they had larger sizes, too, but the smallest one suited my purposes) and came in two finishes -- crackle white, and distressed grey. I didn't care for the crackle, and it would have left a texture to paint over without extensive sanding; the grey would be immediately paintable.

I brought it home and dug out a 12x12" sheet of Wonder Woman scrapbook paper I bought years ago and never knew what I was going to do with it. Apparently, I bought it for this.  :) The somewhat subdued colors of the paper look great with the grey frame... which I promptly decided not to paint, since they looked so good together.

The tricky part was getting the back off. It was nailed on with tiny tacks, down too deep in the fiberboard to pull, so I ended up carefully pushing the back off. This left the tacks above the surface of the lip of the frame and I knew getting them to line up would be a pain. Instead, I used a screwdriver as a nail sink, and tapped them down with a hammer.

I had to sand the back a little, because in addition to the tacks, there was also some glue. The backing board is 8" square; I cut my paper 7 3/4" square after I made sure that would cover all the backing visible from the front. I used a permanent glue stick (not too wet, but plenty sticky!) and smoothed the paper down with a credit card. I hit some of the dried glue inside the lip of the frame with sandpaper, dusted it off, and put a thin bead of Tacky Glue all around the lip. The backing board went on next, pressing firmly to seat it in places, and to ensure good contact with the glue.

And here's what it looks like finished:

front view

looking down into the shadow box; it's about 1 1/2" deep

Sorry; I forgot to take pics "in progress," but I hope you can follow along with my process. This was super simple, and a really quick project.

Some of you might be looking at that and thinking, "wow, that's a really busy background, the figure sort of gets lost." And you may be right. Even though the colors of the frame and background are not really bright, it's a patterned background for a small object. I am considering going through some of the old comics and finding a suitable speech bubble to cut out and put near her head, and mat it on white to give it some definition. Others of you might be thinking, "of all the action figures, you chose that one?" Yep! Because she was my first. Plus, she gets totally lost on the shelf with the other Wonder Woman figures (she's only 5" tall with her arm raised)

This idea would work for maybe a trio of small figures (GI Joe-sized) or a pair of larger ones, assuming they don't need more than 1 1/2" deep to stand in. You could showcase some of your favorite smaller figures this way. I say "favorite" because the shadow box was $15 -- expensive if you plan to put all your figs on display this way. And you don't have to go all out like I did and change the backing, you could leave it plain, paint it a different color, or paint an actual background if you're artistic.

If you try it for yourself, I'd love to see the results!

Comics!

In the basement are boxes of comic books, 19 in all. I knew their contents were a mess, and I knew I wanted to get an inventory of them, like the one I did for our library using LibraryThing (I highly recommend that, by the way, it's so easy to use). I ended up buying Comic Collector, by Collectorz and am satisfied with it. There are a few holes in their database, but adding manually isn't a big deal. (There's a trial version you can download if you need to kick the tires first.)

I hauled the boxes upstairs to my computer, more or less one by one, and started entering them into the database, bagging any loose books, sorting by publisher, consolidating boxes. Presently, I have 2 empty boxes. I don't think I'll be able to consolidate much more than that, but we'll see...

Now I am down to the last box of comics... well, two, because one series is screwy in their database (as well as being somewhat screwy from the publisher), so I need to figure out where the people who entered it initially screwed up and try to fix it for my database. Well, and a box of magazines that sort of fit in with the comics. AT ANY RATE, I'm nearly done, as soon as I get another pack of bags. Presently, the inventory is at 1408, my estimate is that by time I'm done, I'll be at about 1600. (Not so many; that guy on Collection Intervention had 30,000!)

Once that's finished, I need to go back through and alpha/sequence the boxes, and sort the non-Marvel/DC boxes so that publishers are grouped together. Because if you're going to do it, you should do it all.

Then have to go through the database and make a list of the missing issues and start filling in holes, because having a series that's missing a title or two makes me nuts. And I'm still trying to figure out where my issue #32 of Lee's Action Figure News & Toy Review went (it's sentimental - the tipping point into starting my female figures collection).

"Deadliest of the Species - Collecting Female Figures"

Some of the boxes I inventoried contained trades and hardcovers. They belong with the comic collection, but not in with the comic books. I think I need one more of those Ikea "Kilby" bookcases to replace a smaller bookcase I have down there already, so I can put the graphic novels there, next to the figures and the comic book boxes. Plus it will look better integrated, if all the cases on that wall match. (It's going to bug me until I fix it.)

I'd like to continue to working on finding first appearance issues for some of my figures, but some of those are pricey and not a priority. What I would really love to do is print out miniature versions of the 1st App covers and display those with the figures... because I so needed another project.

At any rate, getting this finished is a large part of my basement overhaul. OK, you may be thinking that an inventory and general maintenance of the comic books doesn't really make the basement less free of clutter and stuff. But it is part of the basement, it is something that needed to be done, and when I'm down there working on getting the piles eliminated, the chaos in those white boxes nags me. Soon, there will be order. Soon there will be finished grownup space. (Hey! they may be toys, but they belong to an adult and they're displayed as a collection.) Soon I will have my girlfriends out to party down there. Of course, "soon" is relative -- if I can make it happen within the next 4-5 months, I'll be thrilled.

And dammit... if the comic book shop didn't open until bloody noon today, I could have been done with the comics by now...