🗝️ chatelaines part 2 🗝️

Featuring the triumphant return of the twin mayors of birthday town: I made a couple more chatelaines for my girls! I wanted to make a silver one and a gold one, and here are Vesper and Citron to model them!

Lowdown on the silver one: Wow, I found some little tassels amongst my craft supplies that I got to attach to the miniature suitcases I made YEARS ago, and since there was an all-silver one, I thought, "Sure!" I don't know what the item could represent in terms of a tool or useful item for Citron, but hey, who knows. But upon further inspection of charms at the craft store (I went back to get more chains for these chatelaines) I actually found one that had tools, specifically! Two types of saws (I used one on here), hammers, wrenches. That's so funny to me. While the wrench might have been the most useful for an artificer-type gal, I liked the shape of the saw the most! I believe this one is a hacksaw, specifically! And I found a fork charm at a local bead store, as well as whatever the one on the rightmost in the photo is. I don't know what exactly this is, other than a drop-style charm, but in my imagination, this could be some kind of scent pot or holder for some little tool or gadget!

Again, I used a gear for the medallion portion of the chatelaine, and just jump ring-ed it on.

For the gold chatelaine: Another local bead store finding, but there is this little gold clasp-looking charm, and I don't rightly know what it is. But it looked like some sort of pocketbook or a cover for a notebook, so that's what I'm pretending it is. (It might be a clasp, but I'm really not sure.) There's also a clock hand from the gear packet, and a colorful charm from the Explorer packet I got for my first chatelaine. Also, I made a little keyring out of a jump ring and several small key charms from a packet I got at Michael's. Even though the keys aren't bright gold, I still felt like it gives the chatelaine a more lived-in, vintage and useful look, instead of just being fancier-seeming items.

I didn't put a medallion on this chatelaine since I didn't really have anything I liked for that.

But here's Vesper's full 'fit...

As you know, I like more elegant looks for Vesper. Things that make her look, dare I say, elfin! While nothing will ever look as beautiful as her stock, which to me is exquisite, this outfit gives her the vibe that she is the keeper of a little fairy garden. One surrounded by a rock wall; one with an ancient well hidden within, which may or may not be a wishing well. She strolls and tends to the flowers in the fairy garden.

I don't think I listed all the outfit deets for Citron in my last chatelaine post, so I will do that now!

Vesper's deer headband: made by me
Vesper's leaf crown: made by me
Vesper's peplum top: Sugar Mag (I got it in 2010 off eBay)
Vesper's skirt: CraftyCoraShop on Etsy
Vesper's shoes: her own stock

Citron's goggles: her own stock
Citron's black blouse: HelloCoolCat
Citron's skirt: CraftyCoraShop
Citron's shoes: Time After Alice's stock shoes

Finally: "the twin mayors of birthday town" is an old My Brother, My Brother, and Me reference (I was an early MBMBAM adopter back in the day, and also an early MBMBAM abandoner, haha) and when I Googled it just now to find the episode I was referencing, the first result was not MBMBAM, but my own blog post about Vesper and Citron??? Whoa. Wild. Real snake-eating-its-own-tail stuff.

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Fey's modern life

WOW, I adore Fey. Dang, she's just so cute with her Licca body. It gives her such a whimsical air, with that head-tilt. And gosh. I just. FBLs...

I'm still just so sad the mold is not being produced any longer, even though that's been the case for a very long time now. I have seven FBL girls, and I think eighteen total were produced. That's quite a lot of FBLs and I sometimes wonder if I will ever get another. To me, their faces are so incredibly sweet. Any FBL would be very loved here at Chez Maidensuit.

ANYWAY, I made each little piece of this outfit, except the shoes, which came from thehandflower -- but those, I did paint! They were just plain blue but I painted the laces and rubber bits white myself! I crocheted the earband, sewed the crop top, and made the little skirt back in 2023 expressly for Fey! This fabric is so fun and odd. The background color is kind of a sickly pinky-beige (... a good descriptor for me tbh) but it has these great blue and mint shapes that are sort of 80s or early 90s! Kinda new wave-y or Pee Wee's Playhouse or something? The color palette's very Rocko's Modern Life, actually. It reminds me of a matching pink sweatshirt/stirrup-pant combo I had circa age 10 that had little geometric shapes on it.

FEY T_T Just look at that FACE! Like a couple of my other girls' hair (thinking of Gavin specifically) it has sort of yellowed with age, but I don't mind that it leans a skosh more green than blue these days. I think that is the case for a lot of brighter Takara hair.

I like this tiny corner of my back porch, by the way. The mossy patina and chipped paint and dirt and weeds and everything. I always love pictures taken here. It's in the background of the header pic up at the top of my blog.

By the way, Fey brought you a drink. She wants you to stay hydrated. And she wants you to know the Feytorade matches her shoes.

(The drink mini is from the Teeny Tinies! Gamer Essentials playset, which came with amazing junk food options.)

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🚨 emergency chatelaine post 🚨

I made Citron a chatelaine!!! And I'm only calling it an emergency because posting about it is knocking other doll dressup posts further back in my post queue, haha!

Let's talk chatelaines without me being anywhere near a historical fashion expert. They're basically belts (more usually belt clips) from which dangle useful items a woman might want to carry around with her. These, to me, are an exquisite combination and function and beauty. What your own personal chatelaine might hold was very relative to who you were and what you might need on you at any given time, and they did range in, say, fanciness. I found this page on chatelaines useful for not just explaining the concept of a chatelaine but also its accessories.

(I sourced all these images from Google Images, so they're a mix of extant historical examples and costume recreations!)

Objects one might find on a chatelaine: a pocket watch, keys, scissors, knives, hooks, sewing supplies such as tape measurers, pencils encased in a tube-like holder, notepads, dog whistles, scent/perfume containers, smelling salts, a little purse for some coins or a hankie or something. You could trick out a chatelaine to be hobby-specific, even. Tote along all your needlework stuff on your needlework chatelaine! Are you a lady who needs a magnifying glass multiple times a day? Keep yours with you on the ol' chatelaine.

Inspired the by the various sizes of jump rings Anne gifted me, I decided to make Citron a chatelaine, and to have it be steampunk in style. I got the following additional supplies for it:

Just a couple of cheap $2 chains (one is silver and the links are shaped like hearts and the other is black) so I could harvest some links and also their clasps. I found some gear ephemera ("inclusions," the packaging says) and also a charm set ("Explorer Charms," it says) that I got particularly for the sun and moon charms. I also bought a set of tools with some pliers and cutters, since I didn't have anything like that already, which was half the cost of my purchase. But worth it, if I explore any more crafting of this sort! I couldn't have succeeded at this without them!

I decided I wanted to lean into a mixed metal look instead of an all-silver or all-black look so her chatelaine could go with any dressup. And despite my best efforts to try and find tiny charms of useful things, tools of any variety, I couldn't find anything in my local craft stores like that. No charms of scissors, knives, science equipment. Most of the charms, intended for human-sized jewelry, were on the larger-to-unusable side in terms of scale, anyway. So I just decided that it's alright if this chatelaine doesn't exactly offer Citron useful items. I did manage to find a key charm that came with a set of beads I bought off Amazon in 2022 -- such a lucky find for this project!

This was, for the most part, a super easy and quick make that I really enjoyed! I just snipped off the end of one of those chains to act as my belt, used several jump rings from Anne to attach charms to small lengths of chains harvested from the bigger lengths, and also used jump rings to attach the small lengths to the main belt. I did attempt to vary the length of chain from which each charm was dangling so I could get that satisfying drape of objects, but I think this was sometimes not noticeable because the size of each charm differed greatly.

Charms used: the tarnished-gold sun charm from the pack I purchased, the silver key charm I already have, a black gear from the gear inclusions pack, and a bronze clock handle charm also from the gear inclusions pack!

For the medallion at the top of the chatelaine, I superglued three gears from the pile of gear inclusions together and attached them onto the belt with jump rings. I thought that'd be better than just supergluing it onto the chain, in case I ever wanted to change it out again. And also because superglue is a FREAKING MESS. I already accidentally damaged my cutting mat during the process of gluing the gears together, hahaha. Lesson learned, there, but I just didn't want to superglue the medallion to the belt. For whatever reason, attaching the medallion to the chain acting as the belt was the hardest part of the whole project. It was so fiddly and wrangling all the chains to hang in the proper place while the medallion got hooked on took the most time of anything!!

BUT I DID IT! The mixed metals steampunk mini-chatelaine of Citron's dreams. Or rather, my dreams. Maybe Batman's dreams, too.

I feel like I could have made this into more of a belt clip situation with something like a pin back glued to the "medallion" made of gears. And I maybe could make the attachment of the medallion to the belt chain cleaner by sewing it on?? It might be less visible than the jump rings, and still temporary. There might be several better methods of construction in general, indeed.

Still, despite the fiddly-ness and the feeling that I could have constructed something more "accurate" or something, I'm super happy because I want to outfit Citron with fun stuff like this. I feel like I will definitely attempt another chatelaine! For her, and maybe also one for Vesper?? Doing an all-silver or all-gold one would be satisfying, and seeing if I can locate some tinier and more specific charms on Etsy seems satisfying too!

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