To UK residents from FeatherStitched

Here's a message about fabric from

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"So I'm based in the UK, and when I first decided I wanted to make a human plush, I had no idea what material to use for the skin. Well, ok so there are a plethora of materials, but my problem was the colours. I could not, within the UK, find a material like deersuede, velour or fleece that came in suitable skin colours.

The material I originally started buying was "chamois" coloured Doesuede from- you guessed it- America. This wasn't a problem until the shipping cost went up. I mean, it went WAY up. It doubled at least. And I could find no way to justify ordering that material again. The other problem was other than chamois and doll pink, there aren't a lot of colours to choose from.

I've spent months e-mailing different UK suppliers, scouring e-bay, changing my keywords, looking for good skin colours for plush dolls. Zilch. Nada.

At one point I ordered some minky from Igloo on e-Bay. It came from Korea but was not the colour I'd been promised. Instead of moaning and sending it back I decided to see if I could rectify this myself.

Several boxes and mixtures of dye later, I had a beautiful skin coloured minky, and a piece of tanned-skin minky too. And I'm not addicted. I've been buying Bamboo Velour, which is an economic and beautiful skin fabric, and experimenting with different dyes. I don't just want to make generic anime-character skin either, I'd love to go for different ethnicities, so I could make characters like Cyborg, Aisha Clan Clan or a couple of my OCs.

What I wanted to know was, have other doll artists had this problem? Have other artists looked at the available doll skin colours and shook their heads? I am a slow worker, and I spend more time prepping fabric than I do actually making dolls, so the amount of fabric I own is unreal. If I offered it to sell, for just the cost of the fabric and the dye, would people be interested in hand dyed skins?

I just decided to experiment by listing a 75cm X 50cm piece over on e-Bay (www.ebay.co.uk/itm/20106580087…) just to test the water. I know my audience is not the largest anymore, but I'd love to hear other artist's views on doll skin!"