A Dilly Doll History...
Back in 2004, a friend of mine from AOL told me about this sim-like game called Second Life, and said that I should check it out. At the time, they only had 7 day free trials. I signed up for an account (name witheld) and began to fart my way around. There was very little here. There was one popular club, and a few stores. Not too much that was exciting. After my trial was up, I walked away from the game, and went back to the wonderful world of AOL....
Several months later, I was bored as hell, so for some reason I decided to revisit SL. Oriana Kuhr was born. I found out that the world was based off of creator content, and started to mess around with the build tools. My very first store was a little noob shop, located on my "first land". Back in 2004, they had a special promo running called First Land. This was land on Linden owned sims where if you had never owned land before, you could buy your very first 512 plot for just L$512. It underwent many transformations for the next couple of years, eventually ending up to be just residential. In 2006 I met a guy in a nightclub, and we became fast friends. Before the land I owned was sold, he and two friends of his started to buy up plots around mine. I purchased a few as well, making our plot as large as we could. I think we ended up with about just over 1/4 of the sim at some point, and we all put up houses. Eventually, we all sold and moved on. It was around this time that I began to make furniture.
Beds, dressers, tables, etc.....but then, I started to get into something that I never imagined I would. Bondage display furniture. I used open source scripts from Amethyst and built in partical chains and collars into this bondage furniture. It was all purely for displaying avatars, and none of it was interactive. At the time, I was a dancer (yes, Ori went there too lol) at a metal/goth club owned by a friend of mine, called Death Alley, and this helped pay for my building materials. Eventually I was promoted to club manager, and one of the dancers that we had hired showed some interest in my work. I later found out she was a scriptor, and asked her to join my then named company called Bondage Angel Designs. She agreed. We began working on collabs. I would build something, explain to her how I wanted it to work, and she would write the scripts for them. Or at least, that was what was supposed to happen. She bought a sim, and we moved the store there, and at some point she decided to start up a store of her own. Ok, np. But then one day, I went into her shop only to see that she had been selling things using the BA scripts, or at least, the scripts that she said she was writing for BA. I blew up, she denied it, i removed her from BA, took the store down, and that was the end. I stopped building the furniture, and stopped selling it. At the time it was pretty lucrative too, but I felt used and just wanted to end it all.
Rewind to 2005, I was working as a Tringo host and dancer at a club called RockN Races, where I met my later-to-be best SL bud, Genie. Fastforward to January 2008, Genie finds free skin templates on the web, and suggests we make skins. We attempt it, and open a shop together on a small plot of land she owned. By august, we were both burnt out on skins, so we both attempted clothing, and BINGO! I had been running under the name Bondage Angel Designs again, but once I started to get the hang of clothing, I did not want to be attached to that name if I succeeded in the clothing industry, and thus, *Dilly Dolls* was born in september 2008.
October 2008. I participated in my first fair. The TOT fair was fun, and just because, I entered one of my first costumes (The Darkened Mad Hatter) into the costume contest. I did not win, but I heard out in the audience (i was there on an alt) a LOT of positive comments and compliments. This really lifted my spirits.
Fastforward to present time...As I continue to learn and create, I am seeing the world of fashion creator character in full swing. Other than one particular creator taking a compliment I gave her and turning it into a "threat to copy" and spreading my name negatively around SL, I am doing very well. I still enjoy what I do, even though it seems that I never have time to get anything done. But I do it for the fun, and for the fans, and I plan to be doing it for a VERY long time. I still have my original avi, as well as several alts, so who knows...maybe if I can find the time, I will start up another store somewhere :)