video: Get Drew Ready With Me!

New Dolly Dressup vidja!


Beatrix was next in line to be dressed, but she recently got this really cute vintage Ken doll sweater from eBay and I couldn't wait to put it on her. She looks so cute, I don't want to undress her just yet!

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The unlikely blonde, back for seconds.

July 4th marked my one-year anniversary as a pinkhead! After a year of tending to my own roots with Manic Panic bleach, I knew I wanted to get back into the salon to have a "refresh," so to speak, of my hair, and get rid of some of the little dark patches I had, especially in the back. Make it a nice clean slate so I can spend another year as a pinkhead!

So last week, I finally got that done. I also got it cut, and it's pretty short! I used to have super short hair (a faux hawk, in fact) so it's nowhere near the shortest hair I've ever had, but it's really refreshing just the same.

The pink I had in my hair didn't want to totally lift, which is fine with me, since I just want to put pink on it again anyway. But I'm enjoying my second short stint as a bottle blonde... with stray pink. Being blonde doesn't suit me at all, in terms of my skin tone (in these pictures I'm wearing makeup, so it's more evened out and less red than it is normally), and even though I'd love to have marshmallow pink pastel hair, I don't think that would suit me, either. My face and hair would be the same color!

I'll be putting pink on again sometime this week, whenever I feel up to that, so I wanted to capture my "pastel iZombie" hair while I still could!

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filling up a miniature shelf

The past few weeks, I've been making miniature books and boxes with paper specifically to fill up these shelves that came in the Ikea Huset... set. (That sounds awkward, but I'm gonna go with it.)

I've been making all this out of scrapbook paper -- or maybe cardstock? It's a heavier paper that I got from a pad that I bought at Michael's for $5. It was a "hot buy" and super worth it! But certainly heavier than regular scrapbook paper. I got this shabby chic-ish one with a lot of florals in it, and I got one that was all gold foil and white, too.

The pink paper encrusted with sparkles was a separate buy. It looked so pretty and multi-faceted, although its opalescent sheen doesn't truly show up in these pictures.

I made the boxes by expanding on this "inchie box" tutorial. I just embiggened the dimensions to fit the shelves more fully and left off the tops, so it would look like storage cubes. (I guess I should see about adding handles or something!) But the inchie box looks pretty cute, too! I did a 4 1/2" square instead of a 3" square, if you have these shelves and want to do something similar!

Because I guess I like to make everything super tedious, the books are filled with actual notebook paper that I cut up into pages with scissors and just stacked and glued together. See a close-up here on my Instagram! One of them has fabric tape on it to emulate binding. It's not tidy, but that's okay!

Other little things I've currently got populating the shelf include a small pink rabbit figurine I've had for a really long time -- it was a gift from a friend! Also, a toadstool I made years ago. Also, the mini-knitting I made at the beginning of this year, and little yarn balls in tiny baskets I acquired off eBay. The little letter is from a package I also got at the craft store and painted gold with gold glitter. I made it for another project, but its miniature size made me reach for it as a possible decoration.

Making the boxes involved scoring, and I did this with a nail art tool and a ruler. The nail art tool is basically exactly the same as the scoring tools I later saw in the craft store, and I already had it. It works really well. I don't want to junk up my desk, which is already pretty worn, even more by scoring a bunch on it, so I looked for a proper scoring board at the craft store.

This one is from the Martha Stewart craft line, and I think it was $11, but I used a 40% off coupon, so I scored it for like $6.50. Heck yeah! I haven't used it yet because I got really used to scoring with my little nail art tool and, well, I fear change. But I'm still all stoked.

I made the books without scoring anything, since I didn't really think of it, but I think I'll make some more and hopefully their spines will be neater with some scoring!

Honestly, I've been hunting on and off for miniatures all year, and even though I've had luck with scoring wicker furniture off Etsy and at antique stores, I haven't had luck finding 1:6 scale stuff I like.

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Heaven is a place on Earth, specifically South Korea!!

Guys!! In non-Blythe, non-craft, non-hobby news, my favorite k-pop girl group just dropped this comeback track/music video/FULL ALBUM!



Ahh!!! I have such stars in my eyes!! This is so important and exciting for me! Yes, I love SISTAR and Secret and SunSHINE and Girls' Day and YMNTD and Miss A and Orange Caramel and Red Velvet and Macaron 5 (some of these are fake names I tossed in there, since I know this list is gibberish to people who don't care about k-pop) and I loved Yenny's Ha:felt solo project, but this is WONDER GIRLS. They're what got me into k-pop back in 2007.

It was so exciting for me when the Wonder Girls came to America and opened for the Jonas Brothers on tour, and that was when the JoBros were really popular.

I find that in the States, there only seems to be room for one or two girl groups at a time. Right now it's pretty much just Little Mix and Fifth Harmony, right? It's either the Bangles or the Go-Gos. Back in the mid 90s it was TLC and En Vogue. Then in the late 90s, when the Spice Girls were the reigning girl group supreme, there were a bunch of -- forgive the pun -- wannabes coming up right behind them, like All Saints. There were a ton in the teenybopper magazines at the time that were a flash in the pan. Then it was Destiny's Child, and I can't think of a group that rivaled them here in the States.

But in South Korea the scene is saturated with girl groups, and I absolutely love it. I fairly strictly listen to Korean girl groups, not boy bands; I love that there are so many young women dominating the scene.

The Wonder Girls have had a rollercoaster ride. They left South Korea when they were super popular and gave it their all to try and make it in America. They were the first Korean act to crack the Billboard Hot 100, way way way before "Gangnam Style" became a thing! They did an English song with Akon. I was sure they were going to crack their way into the American music scene.

But over time, members left for various reasons. Then they seemed to all be going their separate ways for a while, doing solo projects and acting and modeling and hosting, and I really thought that as a group, they were kaput, but just not saying so. But they've revamped their group into a band and have come out with this album! I'm so stoked for this comeback!

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Two-Day Trippin': Treasure Trail

I don't need to tell you this, probably, but Texas in the summer is boiling hot! While there, we had meant to do some more sight-seeing than we did. There's a toy museum right next to our hotel and we were all interested in visiting it. However, after walking to some antique stories nearby and giving them a look, we all felt absolutely miserable from the heat and agreed to come back when it wasn't the height of summer.

One antique store had a puzzling amount of fairy figurines. ABSOLUTELY PUZZLING. Hundreds of them. I liked this one. She was sitting amongst geodes.

For some reason I took a picture every time I saw a clown painting, picture, figurine, whatever... but I don't want to post those on my blog, haha. There were tons of them.

I had been looking around in all the antique stores we visited specifically with an eye for miniatures. I saw several miniature tea sets and a few doll trunks that were out of my budget and not my taste anyway, and weirdly, I found an entire basket of doll hair. Just hair. Just hair in bags. Otherwise I didn't see too much. But I scored something at the last store!

I got a set of four Blythe-size wicker furniture pieces, all for a total of $14. I haven't sat a doll in them yet because they're a little bit grimy, and in some places, splattered with some kind of blue ink or paint.

I'm going to clean them as best I can and touch them up where they've been stained, but I like the shabby chic look, so I don't want to lose that. Size-wise I am fairly sure they'll fit my dolls well, but if not, I feel like they'll still be cool "set" pieces, if you know what I mean.

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