now i'm your daisy

Happy July. No sense in not mentioning it: I've started a new med (ya girl takes like a dozen pills every day) and it's made me feel real wonk in a startlingly wide variety of ways. So this post, while it does have a running theme, is not going to be my most coherent. Just a small collection of different Things Of Late. Whee!

As pictured above, I recently got some daisy knobs for my guitar! Y'all remember Karma, surely! Well, Pinterest totally got my ass. That's where I saw them. They were cheap enough to seem like a fun purchase, and it was definitely an impulse purchase on my part! I rarely actually plug in my guitar to my mini amp, so I don't use the knobs frequently. That's good, because I don't think these knobs are super functional. One of them doesn't seem to turn the dial it's supposedly gripping onto. However, these are just a little something that makes my guitar look and feel cheery and me-ish, so I really like them nevertheless. They make me happy whenever I pick up my guitar.

I've been making these crochet flowers the past couple of days. Another throwback to an older post: I crocheted around a phone charging cord to give it a vine-y appearance. It is just to cute-ify things, you know! A whimsical touch to an otherwise boring and ugly thing. I always thought, "It'd be even cuter with flowers." Since that post, the cord pictured has met its final end, so I've crocheted two more cords, and may well do even more, if I need things to do during knitting club. And I have decided to go ahead and experiment with sewing flowers onto the cord. I'm still in the flower creation stage right now. I'm using this pattern for these flowers. But I'd like to find a few more so I can get in some variation.

Just for fun: Olive in a drawstring dress printed with daisies! I'm gonna freakin' squee just looking at her!! I have yet to dress her in anything other than green. Maybe someday.

Also just because I think it's fun/cute: I got this pink and daisy-print heating pad last month. I'm super rough on heating pads. I use them all the time. And of course eventually they give up on me. I've gotten the same plain gray heating pad the last three times I've had to replace my heating pad, and this time I decided to switch it up. Maybe this one will last longer than a couple of years. Or maybe it won't. But I'll find out! It's very cushy and fuzzy, which I'm not used to. But I gotta say it goes better in my room than the plain gray one I keep replacing over and over.

To be honest this is not even the only daisy-ish stuff I could have added into this post. But like I said, I'm feeling pretty wonky right now, so getting pictures of things is a challenge for me. Just sitting here at my desk, I feel like keeling over and yartzing.

Hopefully these side effects will ease up soon.

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wip: blanket drive ripple

Something I've been working on in my knitting club for the last couple of months is this ripple throw. It's for a blanket drive at my mom's church. I'm using leftover random yarn from prior projects, such as these rainbow pillows and this rainbow ripple. I have so many pinks, peaches, blushes, et cetera! I'm also using some cool tones -- some baby blue, some periwinkle purple, some lavender. Nothing too bright and saturated and nothing primary. It's sort of got a pastel twilight vibe, if that makes sense! Like the sky when the sunset is more springy and blue-gray, rather than golden and orangey.

I'm using a lot of variegated yarns, too, as long as they fit with the tones I'm using. There's a variegated yarn that's got pinks and blues and tan in it, and when crocheted together it looks GREEN, so that's why it appears that there's green stripes in here. A couple of the yarns have spots of yellow in the variegation, too. Keeps it from being too boring and samey, I guess!

It's been a long time since I did a ripple with random stripes like this! In fact, the last one I did was my first ever ripple, in 2012. Ever since then, I've done more purposeful patterns or color blocks. Doing random stripes is really, really fun, though. Deciding what comes next, pairing together colors... a lot of it can depend on how much yarn I have left over in a certain color, et cetera.

Not gonna lie, I have gotten like six skeins of yarn for this, because blankets take up a lot more yarn than you would think. I am using up all my pinks and peaches: a feat I thought impossible. So it's not entirely scrap or leftover yarn. But a lot of it is!!

And watch me like this too much to be happy about donating it. -_-

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more drawstring dresses

I have been wanting to post about this but have also been riddled with shyness, haha. Last year I got really into sewing little drawstring dresses! And this spring, to combat my months-long state of inertia, I cannonballed back into doing so. It seems I love nothing more than to develop a whole workflow and produce a whole lot of something, whether it be deer hats, socks, tights, skirts, or these dresses. As a result, I have made far more dresses than I personally need, just because I enjoy the process, and I enjoy picking out fabrics and coordinating thread and ribbon colors.

Someone once asked me if I'd sell these on Etsy, so that's my intention! I also intend to have them be fairly inexpensive -- in the scheme of Blythe doll dresses, anyway! I'm thinking $12?

And only that much because all the sewing I do is by hand. Although these are super simple, it still takes a little while to do all the hand-stitching to construct one dress. While I typically work in batch mode (cut a bunch of dress pieces, iron all the fabric, sew all the dress pieces, iron them all again, sew them all again, actually put the pieces together, put all the ribbon drawstrings in -- in that order, for these), I'd estimate a dress takes about an hour and a half to complete, from cutting the fabric to finished dress.

I can sew together one of these dresses on my machine, but I feel like they don't look as tidy... I'm still trying to befriend my machine.

I think regardless of the fact that these are a) so laughably simple they barely qualify as garments, and b) hand-sewn, which they definitely look, they have a nostalgic charm to them. They remind me of scoring similar dresses and simple hand-sewn items second-hand on Plastic Paradise or Blythe Kingdom back in the day. Some of my most beloved wardrobe items are handmade and slightly wonky.

And I think there's not a whole lot of things like them on the Blythe fashion market right now. I do a fair bit of browsing for Blythe dresses, very specifically, on Etsy. The typical silhouettes of Blythe dresses I see for sale these days are A-line shift dresses (it's always that one pattern, right?? Speaking of nostalgia) or party dresses with a fitted bodice and flared skirt. Sometimes the party dress style looks more babydoll dress in style, but the silhouette is still "fitted top, flared skirt."

I am a huge fan of such a silhouette!! Clean and classic. So, so pretty. But these have a different silhouette and look, with a ribbon tied at one shoulder. While not all that sophisticated, I think they can still be styled really cutely with different colored tights or socks, sweaters or jackets on top, shoes that match the ribbon or a color in the dress... et cetera!

All this to say: I put some of these up on my Etsy. I have a lottt more to take pictures of/list...!

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