family portrait 2024

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Yooo! Class picture!

I've actually gotten a few requests for an updated family portrait in the last couple of years, but even with five less dolls than I have now, I have been like, "I have no idea how to accomplish such a thing..."

I used to take my dolls out into the backyard and pose them on a bench we had, but we don't have the bench anymore, and ~20 dolls makes a quick hike to the backyard not terribly feasible anyway. It took long enough with seven dolls, and now I have just one shy of twenty. You might not think it's a lot of work to wrangle them, but just moving them across my bedroom to line them up here took sooo long.

(I know that people have far larger Blythe collections and manage to photograph all their dolls at once, but I don't know how these people do it!! Lots of time?)

For this, I turned some plastic storage boxes upside down in order to create a riser, like this is choir class, and draped the boxes in fabric so they wouldn't be too distracting. The dolls aren't in any particular order per se, except that the back row is RBLs, the middle row is FBLs, and the front row is RBLs again. Also, Aury is in front because of course she is!! The newer dolls are in front just by virtue of having been farther away from the desk, and so the last to be placed on it.

There was nothing on god's green earth I could do to keep the dolls' hair from sticking to each other and falling in their faces. I tried to fix Gavin's hair so many times, but it just wouldn't cooperate! So, what you see is what you get, in terms of all that doll hair.

Speaking, you might notice that Drew has her original scalp back on, even though the fading on it is so atrocious.

As a bonus, I have a couple of other group pics to share:

The redheads! The gingers, really, as Fidelia is certainly a redhead too. I have been seriously wanting a little pic of all my gingers together since I got Citron!

Also:

The blondes! Are you seeing these ringlets on Holland??

I thought of breaking down the family into groups by hair color and doing a whole series of portraits, but the rubric breaks down by the time it reaches dolls like Gavin and Miette. I didn't want to have a group I was mentally thinking of as "the leftovers." I know they are just inanimate objects and cannot care, but I still would have felt bad! So I stopped here.

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beret life in miniature

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Ahhh, Junie Moon just dropped BERETS!

I have been really into berets this winter, and have been joking about living the "beret life." I'm only making any kind of deal about it because I tend to get comments when I wear berets?? I don't know if it's because I can't pull them off or I look too twee or just what, really. I have been spoken to in French! I have been asked about my "raspberry beret." (To be fair, I was wearing one in a color that could be considered berry-ish. Berry-adjacent.) Thus I have wholly embraced BERET LIFE, which includes all the commentary that for some reason comes with it!

I think people mean well and the berets are, for them, something they feel they can make conversation about. But at the same time, I can't term a lot of what people have said to me as complimentary?? I don't know; they make me feel playful and happy. It's just dopamine dressing, you know?

Anyway: When I saw Junie Moon post about these new items, I was like, "I HAVE TO GET AT LEAST ONE!" To me it's so delightful they'd come out with these great-looking berets right when I'm notably into berets and have been looking on Etsy for Blythe berets and waffling about which to buy.

But Junie Moon posted them on Instagram before actually making them available in the shop, so I had to wait. I slapped Japan onto my world clock and scooped a couple of these the minute they went live! It was noon in Japan but nine o'clock at night for me. (This was nostalgic for me because I used to do PoupeeGirl on JST.) I actually had a dream the previous night about buying them, so you might say I made my dream come true.

I got the ones pictured at the top of the post, in camel and ivory. I have a camel colored one too, so you just know I'm eager to twin it up!

PS: I'm still in the market for more types of berets for Blythe, like knitted/crocheted ones!

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strawberry skirt + strawberry pixie hat

Monday, January 22, 2024

Here's my second attempt at making a gathered skirt! I used this cute strawberry fabric (which happened to match Phoebe Maybe's stock blouse pretty well) and Winny is deigning to model it for me, even though it's not really her strawberry jam.

This time, on a tip given to me by the wonderful Anne, I lightly ironed the gathers and found it a lot easier to deal with them afterwards! I feel like it turned out minorly better than the toadstool skirt. It looks a lot like a skirt a petticoat should go beneath, but I tried that out and don't love the look.

As you know, I've got strawberry appliques hanging around, so I decided to whip up a pixie hat and slap a strawberry on it.

I usually do pixie hats in single crochet, but I automatically started doing this one in HDC ribbing because I've been doing soooo much HDC ribbing lately -- many of the mitts I've made are ribbed HDC worked in the back loop -- and I kind of like the texture with this gnarled yarn.

Again, this look isn't Winny to a tee, but I think she looks really sweet in it nevertheless. And she was very kind to offer herself as a model.

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