I told you so.

Hey! So, here are some of the drawstring dresses I've made (I told you I would). Olwenn's modeling one that I really like. The pink hearts on this red fabric are so tiny, it gives strawberry vibes! So I paired it with this strawberry cardigan from CuteDollDressUA. Golly-gosh, Olwenn looks great in red. The bow on her shoulder is where the dress fastens, and for this dress I used more of a wine-ish red ribbon. It's just what I had on hand at the time!

Anyway, Fidelia, Olwenn, and Aury are all wearing drawstring dresses right now, plus I have made two I'm sending to my bestie for her Daunting Drusilla, and then there are these that nobody's wearing right now.

You can really see how these dresses are just tubes with little areas for the arms to poke out!

I'm not quiiite done making these little sacks yet; I got a couple of new fabric scraps and some more ribbon today...

Other stuff I've been doing since you last heard from me:

• waiting for dolly mail so I can make a spring haul vid
• reading Dark Rise and Dark Heir by C.S. Pacat
• hyperfixating on the Pokemon anime series, Sun & Moon specifically
• working on a smol ripple :3
• trying to figure out what I think about The Tortured Poets Department

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drawstring dress

Waah! I sewed a dress!!

Okay, so it kinda barely counts as a dress. It's like a tube. But still!

The other day I dressed Mallow in one of the two drawstring dresses I've had in my Blythe wardrobe since back in the day. I think I got them second-hand on Blythe Kingdom; I don't know who originally made them. Basically, they're like little drawstring bags, but open at the far end. They cinch with ribbon strung through a channel that goes around the doll's neck, and then you can tie it at one side.

It's been a while since I've thought about these two dresses. But once I fished the green one out to put on Mallow, I realized, "This is just two pieces of fabric... I wonder if I can sew something like this."

I turned the other drawstring dress I have, which is white with squirrels on it, inside-out and gave it a look. First I traced around it onto some graph paper and tentatively extrapolated the places where the fabric was folded around the top. Then I studied the order of operations in how it had been sewn, folding it at the proper places. (And I have to say, for me, this was genuinely akin to messing with high-level black magicks, so I'm surprised my dark guess-trapolations were remotely workable. Honestly. My brain is not good at this kind of stuff.)

So, long story short, I tested it out and hand-sewed a frickin' DRESS! Out of this cute mushroom fabric, because of course, cute mushroom fabric, what do you take me for! I had some gingham ribbon on hand and thought it matched the vibe well enough to act for the closure. It came together pretty perfectly--in a technical sense, as in, everything works as it should! Of course my hand-stitching looks sort of homespun, especially because I used a highly contrasting thread. (Look... if I am sewing by hand, I have to be able to see my stitches on the fabric!!) And it took a couple of hours of sewing since I wasn't using a machine. But Fidielia is literally wearing it right now, so I do not care one whit if it looks cheesy!

Even having taken a couple of hours, this came together a lot faster than the skirts I've recently sewed, so you can bet I'm going to go through a phase of making drawstring dresses! Look forward to more...

I think they would look cute with some embellishments, like little pockets or embroidery or appliques. But there's something to be said for simplicity too. Simple shape, simple execution.

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"Froggy, you weren't such a bad guy, either."

The other day I was possessed by the urge to crochet a froggy headband for my girls. This is not an original design or concept, really! Just my take on it! There are lots of cute frog-inspired helmets and stuff for Blythe out there.

I'm kinda tickled with the way it turned out! I used a yellow-green yarn (it looks greener IRL than in these particular pics, but it's definitely not lime green), plus some white and chunky black, all of which I already had on-hand, and had myself a nice little time figuring out how I wanted to do the eyes.

I considered using elastic along the back to make it particularly accommodating, but I've done this on other headbands and it's some extra labor, and if you don't get the dimensions of the elastic exactly right, then the headband can be too large or too small, and either slouch or be so tight it slides up and off the doll's head. I did a couple of ties made up of single crochet, and quite simply tying them around the doll's chin before moving them behind her hair works so great!

I also added these heart beads on to the end of the ties, just for a cute touch! (I should probably trim these long draggly bits, huh.)

Honestly, making this gave me so much serotonin. I've been pretty bummed the last couple of months, and this did me soooo much good. I love spending time with my girls, and dressing Mallow in this green drawstring dress I've had in my dolly wardrobe since 2010 inspired me even further, so I made something else too! Stay tuned!

PS: I don't know why this blog post isn't hidden under a "read more" tag like all the others! Froggy didn't want to hide, I guess!

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springtime sittin'

STOP. This picture of Vesper!!! I'm in love. Vesper is very regal in style and this is the first dressup I've done with her where I thought it remotely began to approach suiting her elevated style. She's wearing Vinter Arden's dress and Dear Lele Girl's flower hair pin, and her own stock shoes. The hat looks like Very Vicky's, but in fact, it's one from the craft store that I doctored up with a lace bow!

But let's talk about this bench! Right now in their spring decor section, Michael's has these two miniature benches that are perfectly sized for Blythe!! They're supposed to be tabletop decor, I think. (They have a lot of miniature bathtubs right now too? For putting flowers or crystals in, or something.)

They are extremely cute, needless to say! It's actually rare I see stuff like this out in the wild. By "stuff like this" I mean miniature furniture that is the correct scale for Blythe. These aren't being sold in the miniatures section and aren't meant for dolls, I guess, but I think they're just about 1/6 scale by coincidence.

I not only took Vesper outside for a pic, but Wisp (I couldn't resist the green+brown color combination they've both got happening). It was quite chilly out despite the green spring grass, and windy to boot. Lots of stray hairs flying this way and that, and I quickly gave up before getting too many pics. But I'm pretty dang pleased with the cuteness this bench provided.

In personal news, I'm a month in on a dosage increase on one of my meds. I was on this dosage for a while and went back down a dosage again, but now I'm back up here, MG-wise. It's been messing with my sleep and my creativity. But your girl's out here tryin' her best.

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family portrait 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

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

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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small projects: vine charging cable cover

First thing's first... Be honest... Am I posting... TOO MUCH? I just feel more in-tune with my hobby self than I have in quite some time and it's making me want to post whenever I make something.

Now! Yesterday I up and decided to do this project: crocheting around a lightning cable to make it look like a vine. I've seen this everywhere for at least a few years, and found many really gorgeous flowery examples on Etsy. I made a relatively plain one, as just crocheting the leaves was a new thing for me!

These leaves are not perfect, and I would not recommend the tutorial I used to make them. It didn't have the clearest instructions, so I feel like I ended up not following the directions -- but not on purpose! But crochet is pretty forgiving in that way, so I feel like whatever I did still worked to make leaf shapes. I will say that it was a really fun escalation of stitches to make the curved shape! Going all the way from a slip stitch to a treble and down again!

I also think the leaves would benefit from some blocking, as they are very curly, but I never freaking block crochet. I'll have to think about that.

Another thing to consider: Should I maybe add some flowers to this thing? I don't know how people add flowers to theirs but I'd assume they're crocheted separately and then sewn on... I'd have to find a flower pattern I like to do.

Anyway, this lightning cable was in the process of turning a charming yellow-green, and the plastic casing on the lightning side is cracked. If this was fraying in any way I wouldn't have crocheted around it, but the wire itself is intact.

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Zasha dressup vid!

It's been about three years since my last dolly dressup video, but here is one for my girl Zasha! Filmed almost a year to the day after her unboxing video! That feels special to me! :"]

I have been really Blythe-y this last twelve months. Perhaps I shall never be as Blythey as I was my first year or two of collecting, when I was utterly swept away in the magic of everything. But in 2023 I did a lot of sewing for my dolls and, of course, expanded my family significantly. So it is about time I did another dressup video.

I intend that every doll I own have a dressup video, whether solo or paired with another doll, so I will eventually be doing videos for Winny, Vesper, Citron, and Miette as well. The caveat there is that I feel each of them have this very particular style, and so I want to try and attain some items that really feel like them. I have already dressed Citron a couple of times in outfits that don't suit her at all, and thus, I am particularly determined to expand my wardrobe with things that will suit her -- and the other New Girls. I still don't have enough stuff for Winny.

A couple of blog housekeeping notes:

Lately I've been fixing things up around Cure Touch. Most notably, I re-did the entirety of my Blythe Family page. Somehow it got flagged as having inappropriate content. I have zero clue what content was inappropriate?? But I just scrapped the whole thing and rewrote it. Some girls have new pictures and some don't! But they all have little nameplates I wrote out in Paint Tool SAI for them!

I also changed my About Me page very slightly, mostly by changing out old photos. I haven't had pink hair in way too long to keep pink-haired portraits there! I'd like to change it even more sometime, but who knows.

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mushroom skirt!

I made another skirt! It's this dark green one with a mushroom print. I saw the fabric, which I really love, and thought it'd make a cute circle skirt for Blythes. For this skirt I relied on this video tutorial/pattern, rather than just kind of winging it, like I did with the last skirt I sewed.

This one has a lot of gathering; I've never successfully gathered anything before, and to be honest, I didn't find it very easy to arrange and settle everything how I wanted it. My skirt did not resemble 1:1 the skirt in the video while it was in progress. But the process was an educational experience, haha.

I would very much enjoy attaining more skirts that are about this length, or a little longer. I recently got one of these from CraftyCoraShop and I really like it; it's long and gives historical dress vibes! (I scooped three more in other colors just now!) Shorter skirts and miniskirts don't always feel right on some of my girls.

I miiigght take another swing at this pattern sometime, with some other fabric?

Between the hat, the top, and the skirt, I made almost this entire outfit!!! :)

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small projects: french knit bows

I have been obsessed with making bows with this french knitter I bought in December. You might be familiar with this little doodad (this whosit, this whatsit). I've also seen them called knitting nancys (nancies?) and tricot knitters. The impression I've gotten is that it's kind of a child's activity?? Which makes sense, since it's a fairly simple activity once all the steps are learned. But you use the pegs on top to knit an icord. It's a super stretchy cord! I believe I have crocheted an icord before, but I hated doing it, so I thought buying one of these little things might help.

I have made so many bows now... more than pictured here!

I made a modest number of bows to attach to a couple of pairs of mitts I sold at the craft market I did last month, but I only had time to do a few bows. I was slower at the knitting process than I am now. I intend to use the majority of these bows on crocheted items: mitts, and maybe I'll do a scarf dotted in bows! Not sure yet, but it seems delightful. I might make barrettes or something too.

Right now I've been making a couple of bows every night before I retire, as if journaling or darning socks by firelight. It's been quite nice, and I've had to fight off a temptation to start collecting french knitters due to my affection for this one. There are so many shaped like MUSHROOMS, and oh my word, it's hard to resist those especially... I might have bought one already. The literal only thing stopping me from getting more is that I've already scratched and scraped this one so much, by knitting with a tapestry needle. I don't want to buy a bunch of knitters and then not use them, but I don't have the heart to scrape them all up.

(BTW, I love this blush colored yarn!)

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small projects: crochet strawberries and hearts

Still feeling really crochet-y, by some miracle! Been working up some small items, like this strawberry applique (which I made by following this video). Last year at this time I made these crochet strawberry bags... been really into the strawberry thing for a while now, I think! I want to turn these into mitts, either by granny square-ifying them or perhaps just having them be appliques.

I also made some more hearts. I still have about half of the ones I made several years ago (almost ten years, in fact). I even reminded myself how to do them via the same video tutorial. And used the same sheet of scrapbook paper for a background!

As you can imagine, the strawberries and hearts are made quite similarly, but the strawberry has a lot more steps. The heart is incredibly easy to memorize. Do it once and you'll not need the tutorial again! But I can't seem to memorize the strawberry part of the strawberry, haha. The stem and leaves, I don't need the tutorial for, but I keep having to refer back for the actual fruit part! Stitching on the seeds also makes a strawberry take longer than one of these little two-minute hearts.

This is really really pleasing to me right now, filling up a little bag with hearts and berries!

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new year, new girl (jail for One Thousand Years)

Happy 2024 and all that, but aaah! The Blythe I bought myself for my Craft Market Success arrived, and she is a BEAUT. She's unique in my collection. A) She's an anniversary doll -- my first! B) She's got translucent skin -- for me, another first! C) She's the first Blythe I've bought that's been produced under the Good Smile Company rather than Takara.

Also, she's so fance~

I of course made an unboxing video, should you like to see!

I have named her Miette... after the cat!

Five Blythes in a single year is a lot, I know... some of the most substantial growth my collection's seen in many years! But this year I've enjoyed Blythe more than I have in the longest time. I always enjoy this hobby in a neutral way, but I did a lot of sewing this year, and therefore bonding with my girls. Besides crochet, which I technically did far more of, I had the most fun with my doll hobby this past year out of all of my many other hobbies.

Right now the dream consists of sewing and crocheting while I hang with the girls (the new girls especially), window shopping for Miette, and working on a dolly dressup video for Zasha.

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