Bido

[elusivek]

When Bido passed away 2 years ago, we cremated him pretty much immediately and kept his ashes in a plain urn.

Around the same time, I started seeing doll-making videos. I'm not sure what that technique is called, only that it's poking with a needle? It was amazing seeing the artist making an identical doll.

I managed to track one artist down and her portfolio was really impressive. Her dolls looked really like the animal as shown on the photo.

In all actuality, I stalked her online shop for a couple of months, to wait and see new pieces. Finally, I decided to take the jump and ask her. She said her waiting period was 2 years, and finally in June she said she's going to work on Bido.

She does a few kinds of dolls. I really liked that portrait walking out of frames concept, so it's like those... hunter displays of animal heads? But it's 100% doll only. I thought it would look cool to have all our dogs on the wall that way.

She also does entire "free-standing" dolls, not mounted on a frame or anything. Those were impressive too.

But I'm not sure if it's because it's other people's dogs, so I don't know every single angle of the other dogs, so I found them really identical.

However, she has sent me a photo of Bido now, and... well, I can see it's Bido, but there's something not quite right that I can't place my finger on it. It's probably the eyes. Bido had somewhat advanced cataracts and I had asked for the eyes to be made cataract-free, in hopes of seeing Bido a bit younger. But. I don't know. Something just doesn't sit right.

I'm definitely not going to pull a Karen and say it's not good. But hm.... I still can't point out where the problem is.

I asked her the other day if she's taking any new orders and what her new prices are (it's been 2 years) and she says she's not taking any more new orders as her waiting time is now until 2026 (!!!!) Wow, that's a lot of orders. I looked around to see other artists and it seems now, 2 years later, the general prices are somewhat double of what I had paid. So, ooooooohhhhhh, good business. But a lot of work too!

Comments

[tardive]

I was thinking of doing one of these for my cat who died last year, but I haven't decided for sure yet.

She did a really good job. The main thing I can see is maybe that the angle of the fur on each side of his skull is possibly different. It looks more up and down in the photo. For some reason, that change makes me expect him to be smaller than he actually was.

[elusivek]

It was a bit weird, as I gave her several photos and she decided to base the doll on another photo where Bido had longer fur, but now for the photo she used as background is another photo that Bido had shorter fur, so that is also messing up the comparison.

I’ll be able to comb out the fur, but I asked her to make the black part of the snout a little darker. And then I’m really excited to receive the final product so I can hang it somewhere.

[gilda_elise]

Your Bido looked like a really sweet dog, I can understand you wanted something like this. I think the neck isn't quite right. Bido's seem longer.

Not sure I could handle something like this. I lost both my dogs last year, and my husband bought these two bolster pillows that look a lot like them. Even they can be heartbreaking.

[elusivek]

Yes, Bido was really sweet.

I guess my connection with Bido wasn’t really strong (but I did not love him any less than the others) as I didn’t get or know him until he was an adult dog. I’m not sure how I would react when my close ones (Menina and Max) go, as they were with me for a long long time, I picked them up from the street, both of them. Menina followed me home, and Max I knew him from a housing complex and when the Municipal Kennel caught him, I offered to bail him out, but the housing complex people didn’t want him. “You can’t break even with this type of dog”. WTF. What “break even”? I still don’t understand that mentality, but I’m not going to let a dog I know personally to rot away at the kennel, and took him home.

Back to Bido, he was my cousin’s, then when he had kids, the “Chinese way of thinking” (the wife’s idea) is you can’t have pets with baby kids (ridiculous, I know), so he housed Bido in an old apartment that belonged to his mom (she had passed away already so the apartment was empty). His brother, my other cousin, also had a dog Lala, and he decided to put Lala in the apartment as well for the same reason. So Bido and Lala were living in a human-less apartment for a while. The cousins said they took turns going up there to feed, change the water and clean up…. But to this day… maybe I’m not trusting in nature and find fault in people, I don’t believe they were diligent with that.

Anyway, Cousin (Bido) passed away (jumped off a building), so Cousin (Lala) continued with the feeding and visiting, but then Lala passed away, and this cousin said “why should I take care of my brother’s dog when my dog is gone already”, and tried to get my widowed cousin-in-law to start caring for Bido. Cousin-in-law was a 1-woman-band taking care of 2 kids and didn’t have time for Bido so decided to put him down.

We felt sorry for the dog, he was 9-ish at the time, and we were thinking he would live to 12 or 13 or so, so figured we might as well take him in (what’s another dog when you already have 3 in the bigger scheme of things), so he doesn’t die at the municipal kennel alone and afraid. What do you know, the dog lived another 10 years with us, passed away at home at 19, extremely good boy.