Welcome to the Lee & Pearl™ Mad Scientist Laboratory!

We've wanted to do this for years.

"Lee" and "Pearl" grew up playing with test tubes, wires and meters in our dad's real-life science lab. And like many of you, we pored over SeeJoanSew's amazing Mad Scientist pictorial the moment it launched. So we've always planned to give our dolls their own crazy lab some day, complete with lots of Lee & Pearl costumes and crafts...

That day is today, so all together now — BWAHAHAHAHAH!

Come on in, we're dying to show you around...

Let's start with our dolls' outfits. Of course, we are featuring our 2017 FREE PATTERN for mailing list subscribers, #1025: She Blinded Me with Science Unisex Lab Coat and Safety Goggles for for 18 Inch, 16 Inch and 14 1/2 Inch Dolls, the perfect pattern for doll scientists, mad or otherwise. If you haven't joined our mailing list yet to receive your own copy of this fun pattern, DO SO HERE.

Instead of the more traditional white, grey or light blue, we made our dastardly lab coats out of Halloween-themed fabrics: a muted cobweb pattern for our 16 Inch A Girl for All Time® Clementine, a glow-in-the-dark eyeball pattern for our Wellie Wisher® Willa, and a subtly-sparkly grey for our American Girl Doll® Chrissa.

We added a black vinyl apron to Chrissa's outfit, which we made using the easy chef's apron pattern from Lee & Pearl Pattern 1033: Bonjour Paris Mini Wardrobe for 18 Inch Dolls.

For a different look, we left the collar off our Wellie Wisher's lab coat, fastening it all the way up to the top with buttons instead, and topping it off with a necklace made out of green crafting tubes.

Moving on to the furniture...this is a playset we intend to continue developing for years, so as soon as we finished the outfits, we started planning the basic structures.

First off, we wanted some form of shelving or cabinet, both as a background and to show off our dolls' soon-to-be-growing collection of medicine bottles, scientific and anthropological curios, meters, dials, and experiments-gone-horribly-awry.

We considered thimble and shot glass display cases on Amazon — but wound up finding the perfect curio shelf unit in a local antiques mall. It was a little more expensive than we'd hoped, but still a full order of magnitude less than, say, Caroline's Parlor from American Girl®. Plus, it's solid wood and it polished up beautifully.

From the start of this project, Pearl dreamed of creating an old fashioned, counter-height lab table with a black soapstone top — just like the ones in the vintage chem lab in our high school, which were likely installed during a 1950s renovation.

After a few internet searches, a visit to a discount store where a perfectly sized child's wooden stool happened to be on clearance, and a fair amount of painting trial and error, Pearl achieved the laboratory table of her dreams!

We featured the inspiration, construction and faux-soapstone paint job of this table in a step-by-step newsletter tutorial and Facebook LIVE video tutorial.

Check them out HERE.

While selecting our tabletop materials at the craft store, we also picked up a little unfinished box unit with a drawer to sit on top of the finished table.

We primered the box and the drawer with gesso, then sponged on layers of dark green and black latex, followed by our favorite "Haematite" Inka Gold metallic rub.

We dry-brushed and gently sanded the layers for a well-worn look, then finished with a matte sealer. As a final touch, we rubbed a little beeswax from our sewing kit on the sides of the drawer, allowing it to open and close smoothly.

We already owned our last large furniture item — the Addams Family-style wicker peacock chair, which we found at Goodwill. These must have been popular at one time, as we've spotted identical chairs frequently at vintage stores and antiques malls around the country.

If you are looking for scary props of any kind, NOW is the time to stock up.

We picked up the nearly-doll-sized skeleton in our peacock chair at Big Lots, and got significant coupon and clearance discounts on lots of laboratory jars and beads, and props such as our pumpkin, rat, black bird cage and owl ornament, skeletal bird on a stack of faux books under the lab table, and lots and lots of skulls — including little plastic ones that we cut and glued together to create an experiment gone horribly wrong.

Then we scoured our prop boxes for miniature Dungeons & Dragons dice from eBay, lab and science toys from various Our Generation™ kits, tiny ray gun key chains, dollar store charms, and Christmas ornament and party store miniature toys. We even hit up the kitchen for a pair of vintage Tiki salt and pepper shakers.

We especially love the tiny electrical meters, which came from our dad's collection. If you're not blessed with boxes of elderly electronic gadgets in your attic, search eBay for "vintage analog panel meters," and you will find plenty!

Do you like that glistening pink brain in the middle of our lab table? That was our favorite impulse purchase — a hot pink foam squeeze toy that we found in the checkout aisle bins at the craft store.

We're so proud of the super-realistic paint job that we gave this super-cheap toy that we've written it up as a tutorial that you can follow, step by step.

CLICK HERE FOR THE MAD SCIENTIST "BRAIN" PAINTED TOY TUTORIAL

Mad scientists get peckish in the wee hours, so we made sure to scatter around the trick-or-treat candy we made for our last Halloween newsletter feature. Check out the poly clay Candy Corn tutorial on YouTube here — and the paper printable Fun Size Candy Bar tutorial here.

Here's our poly clay candy corn in a wooden condiment bowl, viewed through a magnifying glass pendant we found in the craft store jewelry aisle. Mmmm... now we're getting hungry, too.

One of the most fun elements in this photoshoot was LIGHTING it all. We're so thrilled that all those unnerving crimson shadows and eerie flecks of color gleaming out of the darkness in our pictures are real, were created live on set, and were NOT added in Photoshop.

We started with our regular photography lights, but switched off most of the bulbs to keep things properly murky. Then we grabbed the remains of a bag of finger lights that we ordered on Amazon two years ago and have been slowly working through.

We tucked red, blue and green finger lights behind the glass bottles on the shelves, and in the drawer unit and behind larger objects on the lab table.

Then we grabbed the red LED LightShow CometSpiral™ spinning lamp that Pearl picked up at Big Lots for the front window of her house this Halloween, and set it to madly spinning in front of the whole laboratory scene.

The results were perfect. We might have to order another bag of those finger lights soon, and maybe grab those spinning LED lights in a few other colors as well.

We hope that you've enjoyed this tour of our Mad Scientist Laboratory. We love this set so much that we're sure to add to it in the future. If there are any props or tutorials you'd like to see us tackle, please let us know at info@leeandpearl.com.

See you next time!