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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sewing chair

I did indeed get myself a chair just for my sewing table, as per my b-day list. I was all set to get the pink one, but then I saw there was a green one that was about half the price, so... duh, I got that one instead! Since it arrived, I set it up in front of my sewing table and got my machine out!!

Chair review: It's really light and was fairly easy to put together. Being able to adjust the height in order to comfortably use my sewing machine was imperative for me. It will also be adjustable for when I am filming dolly dressup videos or hauls or whatever else I need. So I am pretty pleased. But I wonder how it will hold up!

I have successfully, in the past, threaded my machine and wound a bobbin and everything. Even sewed some straight lines on some scrap fabric. However, for whatever reason, I got stuck trying to do the same, this second time. I relied on the same videos as I did last time, but it just wasn't working, for some reason. So I hung there in frustrated, intimidated limbo for a while before tackling it again. My mom's sewing a quilt right now so she gave me some guidance. And so I have been practicing, in this, my tiny sewing corner!

I have discovered that my sewing machine doesn't have speed settings. It is either not moving at all or is eating up fabric at 100 mph. I can only rarely find a "sweet spot" on the pedal where it's going a manageable speed. Rather than the pedal being sensitive, it seems like it only knows two speeds. I'm stymied by this right now. I want so, so badly to gain sewing skills and learn how to use my machine and be able to make things. I've successfully made a couple of drawstring dresses but they look a lot worse than my hand-sewn ones do!

Google says there are devices that can cap off the speed of the machine, but I don't know if it's worth spending a chunk of change on such a thing??

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to a T

New girl alert! Aaahh!! I mean, you already know, if you actually read my posts, but: I gifted myself Time After Alice for my birthday. She arrived very quickly and I thought it would be really fun to post an unboxing video on my birthday. For funsies and specialness. So I worked hard over a couple of days to film a video and get it ready to go by May 7th. Unboxed her on the 5th, edited hard on the 5th and 6th, and managed to get closed captions done at the last moment!

As always, I make unboxing videos for my own memory's sake. My own enjoyment's sake. It transpired that I filmed this one and felt, even as I was filming, that I was doing a terrible, terrible job. I had nooo energy. I was like, "I look terrible. I'm incoherent. The time has come to take myself off the screen again." (I used to not show my face at all and only filmed the doll, but over time I added in b-roll of myself filmed from an additional angle.)

I recall the last time I filmed a doll stuff haul video, I felt much the same. I remember feeling like I had basically salvaged what was unusable footage. Unusable because of me and how I looked. Another self-esteem battering issue is that, by the time I am done editing a video, I am so sick of my voice, my face, my mannerisms, my sense of humor... everything. I feel so much self-hate by the time I'm exporting the finished product that it almost becomes a joke to think of "promoting" the video. I have to battle against my brain telling me how ugly and irritating I am.

Otherwise I genuinely enjoy the editing process of a video. I like pulling in extra images and referencing memes and doing audio transitions and making all the little extras: hand doodles, writing out names, easter eggs in the closed captions. (There's always extra jokes in the CC.) It is a creative outlet for me. And years later I can revisit the videos and see the dolls for the first time again, et cetera!

Anyway, I am in straight-up love with this girl!!! I named her Tiphanie (which I know is a bit OTT, spelling-wise).

I'm really excited right now because I think Tiphanie is a girl who can pull off the old-fashioned look I love so much, but also I think she can wear modern styles, and both will suit her equally! I feel like she fits in really well with my Blythe family. She and Vesper and Miette are sooo fancy to me that I really want to take a picture of them all together.

On the birthday tip, I had a wonderful day, which is incredible to me. It's rare that happens; hence my annual b-day depression. There must have been some b-day magic in the air.

• Got messages from my besties, of course. L, K, E, and J!
• My parents took me out to lunch! I dressed up in a favorite dress with my lace-up boots and one of my berets, and wore my hair in double braids. Favorite outfit = such birthday vibes, u know?
• At the restaurant, someone else was sung "Happy Birthday" to! That was crazy because it's not a super popular restaurant and it's amazing to me that I was there at the same time as this other May 7th birthday person! And as my mom pointed out, it's as if I got sung to, but nobody was staring at me.
• In the parking lot as we were leaving, and old man shuffled by me and said, "Love the beret." !!! My first beret compliment, and it was on my birthday! Usually people are low-key snarky about them but I felt a bit like if the guy had been wanting to crack a joke, it would have sounded more like a joke than it did. I think it was genuine, lol. Thank you, guy. That was a great birthday gift you gave me, sir.
• Hit up knitting club with my mom, and I took a couple of boxes of bakery treats with me for the ladies in the club. I just wanted to do something vaguely celebratory, but this was an ingenious move because I raked in the birthday wishes.
• One lady at knitting club told me, "You look like Anne of Green Gables." WHAT! I laughed in a flustered way and said, "I think it's the braids." But of course this was a compliment of the highest order, and on top of the beret compliment?? Sheesh.
• After knitting club I got to baby-sit my baby nephew!!! I didn't know that was going to happen, and what a delight it was.
• During this my aunt came by and dropped off flowers (the tulips pictured above) and it was nice to see her, and fun that she got to see the baby.
• At one point I picked him up off my dad's lap and his chubby little arms came around my neck. I wouldn't say it was a hug, but he did cling onto me, and he's never done that before. I said, "This has got to be my best birthday in years." He took a nap on my lap after that. (Picture below!)
• My mom made me an egg and cheese sandwich for dinner which was sooo good. I monched away on it while Nephew was sleeping.
• One of my sister's presents to me was a RAT RING (also pictured above) which is just the most Jane-est thing ever. I adore it!!!
• Received some lovely texts from my great aunt, who just got my digits a couple of weeks ago. Texts to treasure, honestly.
• In the evening I met up with my bestie K and we watched some TV with her mom (a fave activity of mine because I like to hang with her AND her mom; her mom is my secret bestie and doesn't know it). Nice chill wrap-up to the day!

Here's a pic (courtesy of my mom!) of Nephew conked out on Anne of Green Gables. Nephew just turned nine months old on the 8th. These nine months have flown by. But all time with him has been the very, very best.

I've had a lovely couple of days since, too. Thursday was my mom's birthday and I got to spend time with her. Friday, I saw my RL friends and we went to dinner and watched a movie. You best believe I wore my lavender beret, and scooped another compliment from the waitress at the restaurant! This weekend I cooked and took the time to give Tiphanie a hair brushing and treatment with a hot water dip, then a dip in hot water with fabric softener. When her hair was dry, I also dressed her for the first time!!

Crown: made by me
Dress: From the ORN on Etsy (circa 2020)
Petticoat: MINIJIJO on Etsy (circa 2017)
Socks: made by me
Boots: HelloCoolCat on Etsy

Her hair is muuuch more orderly than it was. During her brushing I discovered she has a metric ton of hair, almost as much as Klara. She had some ringlets after her hair dried but I picked through it a bit with a knitting needle and those broke up some. I think if I give her another treatment and form the curls by hand, she'll end up with ringlets like Holland! Holland had a totally wiry bush and now she has calm little ringlets! So, I may do that, and I might give Miette a similar treatment at the same time.

This could have been two posts, but like I said, Tiphanie was a birthday girl, so she really overlapped with all this! And anyway, it's my blog!

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bday42

Ah, crikey. Another ding-dang b-day's on the horizon. Really getting sick of these...

I jest. Partially. As I've said before, I tend to get birthday depression, and sometimes making wish lists is fun. So I'm here with this year's edition.

Firstly, I'm looking to get a chair for my second desk -- which I call my "sewing table" because I have good intentions. The chair must be adjustable in height and not have wheels. This pink one is what I've tentatively picked out. This is all so I can sit at that desk to sew and film videos without having to drag a spare chair in from the dining room.

Secondly, I would like some simple sewing supplies! In a moment of buffoonery at my desk, I knocked over a drink, and it fell into a little plastic storage box where I was keeping some WIPs and a few spools of thread. The spools happened to be my most-used colors. As the spools are now sticky and discolored, I'd like to just replace them.

Plus, I could really use another disappearing ink pen. This double-sided one is a good one. The purple side's more visible on darker fabric and I like that it is air soluable! But I've used up the purple side, and am on my way to using up the blue side as well.

Lastly, I have been looking at Time After Alice for some months now, and saving up with my eye on the prize that is her. And, actually, I have bought her!!! AAAHH!!!

I immediately got tummy flops after finally purchasing her. I'm not sure if it's gauche to talk about the cost of these dolls, even though everyone who collects them knows they can get ludicrously expensive. But the amount I paid for her is the most I've personally paid for a Blythe. (I've been incredibly fortunate to have some pricier girls gifted to me in the past; I would likely never have even tried to attain Shelley Victorian, for instance.) I definitely feel like she was a big splurge for me, even in terms of these pricey dolls.

But I'm pretty giddy about it! I'm not sure she'll arrive quite in time for my birthday on May 7th, but that's totally okay. I'm all about having things to look forward to.

PS: I have been non-stop dolly sewing for the last few weeks, and still intend to post about that pretty soon!

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It sure is April 2025!

Look at this cute dress I got a couple of weeks ago! Seems made for Beatrix! Here are the 'fit deets.

Beret: Dear Darling
Glasses: ChocolateHandmade on Etsy (seems to have closed)
Dress: AtelierPetitesfolies on Etsy
Shoes: eBay ~14 years ago

Beatrix is such a trooper because her pale face clashes with her more tan Licca body so much. Girl, same. Except my body is fishbelly white and my face is red.

Anyway, this whole year thus far has been "off" for me. For the majority of it, I have not been productive or creative. I keep a running list, every year, of projects I have completed in that year. By the year's end, the list is pretty long, populated with "wrote this story" and "crocheted this thing" and "sewed 45 of these items" and "made such-and-such video." It's not unusual for me to have 30-50 items on that list. But by the time the calendar flipped to April this year, I noticed I had only two things on the list, both of them small crochet projects.

I have had the desire to do doll sewing in particular, but have found it really difficult to start anything at all, even simple and non-demanding hobby things. And so, I just... haven't crafted, or written, or been proactive with regards to much of anything. All year.

My best friend said, "That's pretty unusual for you."

It really, really is. I am always up to something.

I think partially it's The Horrors. I talked about finding it hard to be online lately already, and I find that's evergreen these days. A lot of my creative hobbies are tied to the internet and thus even when I'm only trying to look at hobby stuff or keep up with friends, I wind up exposed to The Horrors.

A thing I have been doing is bullet journaling. And I have been really enjoying it, especially since my mom has been doing junk journaling and we have sat down together several times to work on our repsective journal pages. But it doesn't feel like a creative project, per se. It also is an ongoing thing, so it is never a completed project. Although I do enjoy making particular little pages.

Here's a Cure Touch page (left) with post ideas and housekeeping items listed, and an "ambitious ideas" page with a couple of personal/hush-hush things blurred out. The point is not for you to read the lists, lol, but to post an example of what little I have been doing. As you can see, I am not bereft of ambitions or ideas. I certainly am not bereft of hobbies. But I have been bereft of that critical link in the chain between "I want to" and "I will do it right now!"

Perhaps another aspect of this is that family time has been really important to me in the last year, with my sister's pregnancy and the birth of my nephew, and all the resulting family gatherings that have ensued. Nephew is eight months old now (!!!) and every time I see him, he's grown; he's learned to do something new; he has new quirks and tendencies. This first year of his life is just amazing. He is the absolute light of my life. All this to say: My focus has been doing things with my family a lot this year thus far, and my schedule currently prioritizes that above everything else. Sleep, for instance.

Here's some screen caps from a video my dad took of me and Nephew hanging out. I'm in my pajamas here and normally do not like to ever display my bare arms, but this is a video I revisit all the time these days, and I just can't help but want to put it here because of how much it makes me smile. Nephew's just squealing and cooing and giving me big grins, and I am listening, talking back, and booping him on the nose.

Happily, I can tie up this post by reporting that a few days ago I broke through the terrible executive dysfunction barrier and did a bunch of doll sewing. So I will post about that soon!!

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springtime sittin' 2: still sittin'

Last March I posted about coincidentally-Blythe-scale decor furniture from Michael's -- and this year, they have more coincidentally-Blythe-scale tabletop decor furniture! Yay! Look at these!

As you can see, I got the yellow chair in the peacock-esque shape! It's giving vintage rattan, except of course... metal, not rattan. Fey looks so cute in it right now, in her TiredMomKnits dress! I'd really like to snag one of these other ones that looks like a birdcage, but the listing online says it's a couple of inches bigger than the one I got. I'd rather see it in person before getting it, and I didn't see them at my local Michael's.

They also have this dragonfly design, which I did see:

I love this color green for this little furniture! But I don't love the design of this one, I admit!

• chair link 1
• chair link 2
• chair link 3

Gotta say, I hope they'll continue this trend next spring too. It's so fun to get what functions as doll furniture for, like, less than ten bucks a pop.

Here's a little bonus pic of Fey's pullring and mushroom sleepy eyes charm! I believe she's had it for a good ten years now!

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figurine display case!!!

A while ago I posted about various cute tchotchkies that I will not be collecting, thank you very much. In that post I also talked about things I am allowing myself to collect. Amongst the things mentioned: little figurines of Litten! I was gifted three of the small figurines I currently have. Circa Christmas I found myself motivated to expand my collection and bought three more! One of them, of course, turned out to be way bigger than the other little 1"-2" figurines. But the other two are the size I wish to collect. And really, I have room in my heart for just about any Litten.

These figurines have been living on a floating shelf in my room, but as I attained more of them, I began to run out of room on my tchotchkies shelf and found myself drawn to a certain display case I saw on Pinterest and my brain was quickly eaten by Cute Storage Display Case worms.

Ahhh! I seriously got an absurd amount of pleasure from the idea of attaining one of these cases and filling it over time with Litten figurines. I would say this concept intrigued and thrilled me for nearly the whole of January. Distracted me, too, as I looked around everywhere at reviews and slightly different listings for what is probably the exact same plastic product with different brand names slapped on the listing title. I ended up finally going with a pink case... in reality the pink is very muted browny-rosy. But I thought the Littens would look cutest in it!

(Here's the whole gang!!! The biggest plush has been wearing one of my Blythe berets for months now. Clearly a Flamiaou.)

My review of this display case is: It feels very breakable, to the point where I'm not sure I want to try mounting it to my wall with the provided sticker. I can just see it falling down in the middle of the night and giving me the scare of my freakin' life when it shatters. The enclosure of the clear door is magnetized, and it's really such a strong magnet that whenever I shut the door, it rattles the case and my figurines fall over inside. They did come with little sticky things to put on the bottom of figurines so they won't move around, but as my collection is in flux, I don't want to use them yet. I want things to be easy to rearrange.

However, I will say, the act of placing of the figurines inside and imagining it full of Littens gives me so much serotonin, it's ridiculous. And my room is dusty, so I'm happy to protect my little Littens from that dust.

Five-ish (perhaps six) figurines of this size would fit comfortably per shelf, so I have room to expand! But right now I'm also keeping my modest Stitch figurine collection in it.

The Stitch figurine collection started just three years ago, when my little sister put one of the figurines (the pink innertube one) in my stocking for Christmas. She knows I love Lilo & Stitch, and I felt so loved and so seen! Later on I saw one of the figurines in the same particular series at Five Below, for $1, and I bought it right away. I asked her for another figurine that Christmas! Since then, every Christmas she's given me Stitch figurines in my stocking. I wanted to complete the collection in terms of this set. For a while I couldn't find any from this series at Five Below any longer. But miraculously I found one just after Christmas, and I dug through the whole box of random discount figures until I found the one I was still missing!! I was so stoked to be able to complete collecting the set I wanted. It's just five cheap figurines -- they each cost $1 -- but it took me three years to get them all!

Completing my in-progress Stitch figurine collection was really what motivated me to actually begin to seek out more Litten figurines on eBay. This is more scattered a task. There's no "set" or "series" to collect in terms of Litten -- the figurines are all from random places, produced at random times. From gachapon machines to bigger playsets to Re-Ment to figures that came inside chocolate eggs. There are some I can likely never attain and they don't all match up perfectly in terms of scale. That takes the "gotta catch 'em ALL" factor out of the idea of collecting them, which is a welcome thing for me. Completion isn't really the point with this collection. It's just my sheer Litten love. My excitement at seeing all these disparate figurines attained one by one all lined up together.

This is sort of inspring me to make a page for each of my collections that could be available via the dropdown menu on my blog, the way the "Blythe family" page is. Sounds satisfying but also like a lot of work. We'll see!!!

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finally, a girl i can drink with

Today's cause for happiness: my new (old) girl has arrived! This is Olive, an EBL Tea For Two originally released in March 2003, and I adopted her from Amber, aka amberblythelife on Instagram. Amber has quite the collection and posts beautiful, varied, colorful Blythe photos! Olive was given her name by Amber. I'm keeping it because I think it suits this girl really well. It calls to mind her green stock! All of which she came with, in her original box! Most of it's still taped to the cardboard, too, NRFB!!! Amazing!

She's in perfect condition. More than perfect! Not a dang scratch on her, and her hair is lovely!

This box was so fun to open, not only because she was beautifully packed with several additional outfits that Amber sent along with her, but because all these little flowers had been sprinkled amongst the packaging. I wanted to remember that fun detail by taking Olive's first portraits with them.

She was also fun to unbox because I did it with my mom! So I did not film it. I was sort of intending to, but when I picked up the package, my mom asked, "Can I see her?" and I opted for the experience of opening her up with my mom instead.

Tea For Two is my very first EBL (!) and definitely the oldest release in my collection, by many years. (Simply Peppermint is technically the oldest girl I have and she's from 2009, released before Ice Rune who was my first ever Blythe.) I haven't actually seen any of the earliest face molds in person until TODAY! All of my girls are RBLs (or RBL variants) or FBLs! So to me, the difference in appearance is very striking and fascinating. The lashes on this girl are super light and delicate compared to the typical eyelashes we see on later releases. It gives her such a waif-y look! I love it! But very immediately, while taking her picture, I was like, "Wow, I don't know how to photograph this face mold." I'll have to learn!

I have been thinking about getting this particular girl, Tea For Two, for literally years now. I know I've talked to my friend L about it several times! In fact, I found instances of her name in our chat logs as far back as 2021.

As you can see, I decided in favor of other dolls almost every time I had the Blythe Gimmes (TM Lucy)! I bought Zyanya Remembers and Aurella Amphitrite instead -- and of course L was the one who gifted me Shelley Victorian, another girl I had wanted for years!! So when Amber put Olive up for adoption I asked for her right away. I felt like it was finally time to scoop this girl!

And aren't these pics of her from Amber's Instagram super cute??? I love the red-orange on her.

( pic one / pic two )

As of right now I have twenty Neo Blythes, and -- wow. That's crazy to me. I never would have imagined it even just a couple of years ago. I had a static collection of thirteen girls for a number of years. My family expanded by a lot in 2023, to nineteen, and I have wondered since if I should cap my Neo collection at twenty. But I must admit, I don't think I will. I am fifteen or so years into enjoying Blythe as a hobby and I still get so much enjoyment out of it. I do get the occasional rash of Blythe Gimmes but for the most part I think I approach the hobby with temperance. Especially since I overwhelmingly favor keeping the dolls I buy long-term.

To end the post: My cat would NOT leave Olive alone and almost every picture I took, he got in. He absolutely had to sit down on this backdrop and sniff her and purr like a chainsaw, no matter how much I kept trying to push him off, shoo him, distract him. Yet he had the nerve to refuse to look at my camera?!

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leaning into it

The other day I mentioned indulging hyperfixations as a means of staying afloat in Times Like These. Not that I think one needs a reason (especially not a dire reason) to indulge a hyperfixation. It just, I have to say, has been such a lifesaver for me of late, and I am embracing it.

Litten, the Pokemon, is a weird accidental hyperfixation I developed last year. Like, this was not a choice I made, hahah. I don't know how better to state this, but my brain feels... sparkly when I see Litten? Like I can literally feel neurotransmitters shooting around in my skull. Sometimes I tingle. Sometimes I want to cry... out of love. Again, I need to express: I didn't randomly decide, "Oh, I think I'll get really into this random Pokemon all of a sudden. This will be my new obsession." I have no idea why this was my brain's response to this Pokemon. It isn't even the cutest Pokemon, imo. And I have enjoyed Pokemon in general, as a franchise, for many years without ever experiencing this type of big emotional response, either to the franchise as a whole or to a singular specific 'mon. This from a person who has a Top 5 Favorite Pokemon list. Even from my perspective it is bizarre to feel this strongly about a Pokemon.

I get a lot of really good brain tinglies and happiness from it, so I'm personally not mad at it. But I do recognize that it is confounding from the outside. I also find it inexplicable, and understand if it seems bizarre or irritating.

Anyway, for my birthday last year, my bestie basically gifted me a whole-ass Litten collection! I posted about it here (and I am going to post even more about it soon)! She gifted me several plush Littens and three tiny figurines. As I noted in that post, I thought it'd be fun to collect more of the figurines.

The figurines need their own post, and believe you me I am looking forward to that post SO MUCH! It's in the chamber!

However, in the meantime: the Litten figurine pictured here with Trainer Fidelia surprised me when I received it in the mail the other day. It's a McDonald's toy and three times the size of my other tiny figurines! I couldn't tell from the eBay listing that it would be so much larger. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the figures in my modest yet thrilling-to-me collection... literally. I doubt it will fit in the display I'm planning.

But I thought, while it's too big for my display, it is actually quite properly sized for a Blythe!!

"Litten! Use Ember!"

Litten used Ember! It's super effective!

It came with a plastic bit of "fire" (since Litten, a fire type, can breathe fire as one of its moves) that clicks into its gaping rectangular maw.

Fidelia and Litten have matching hair! Fur! Whatever! Litten's red-orange face and markings can sometimes lean more red or more orange, depending on the particular plush or particular screengrab. But I thought pairing Fidelia and Litten would be perfect! Sometimes trainers really match their Pokemon!

For Fidelia's trainer lewk, I was inspired by the character of Misty and the way her ponytail sticks up, but also by a sort of athletic look. I used Wendy Weekender's star-studded ponytail holder on one of Deely's pigtails. (I wish I'd adjusted them so they could be seen more clearly here.) I wanted her hair to kind of stick out in a Misty-ish fashion!

She's wearing cropped black leggings I got second-hand on one of the forums, either Blythe Kingdom or Plastic Paradise, back in the absolute day of 2010. She's also wearing a ringer tee with black and white striped sleeves, but you can't really see it because she's got on Sporty Lover Finesse's windbreaker. She's also wearing SLF's sneakers -- which are good, but I hardly ever use them. With the white top and black pants, it's an outfit very resminiscent of SLF's stock. That was accidental!! The windbreaker was a last-minute addition. But really, said windbreaker looks cute with Fidelia's hair, imo.

If I could change anything about this outfit to make it look more trainer-esque, I'd sew red patches onto the knees of the leggings. I think red sneakers would also be really good.

I think another cute trainer-ish outfit would be a pair of overalls and Simply Mango's stock stripey tee. It'd be so fun to do a whole post of trainer-inspired outfits. I'm also currently wondering if they make 1/12 size Poke Balls...

(They do. I will buy some next month, haha.)

Final note on these pictures: Between you and me, I photoshopped Litten's mouth in the first picture so it wouldn't be an empty square, but one of his typical mouth shapes. Not a big smiler, is Litten.

Okay, so, this delighted me beyond all good sense. I have more to share about my figurine collecting, and will do so soon.

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The Brady Kids - Time To Change.mp3

Dressed Lamby in this romantic outfit the other day and was soooo happy with it! She looks like she should be riding on a bicycle with a baguette in the basket. I especially love the way this beret looks with her swoopy fringe!

Blouse: YlangGarden on Etsy
Skirt: CraftyCoraShop on Etsy
Shoes: Thehandflower on Etsy
Beret: Dear Darling via Junie Moon

I myself have been happily living the beret life this winter:

My gray hairs are crazy these days. One of the reasons I dyed my hair pink back in 2014 or whenever was that I already had a lot of grays and didn't feel old enough to have them in such abundance yet. Well, it's twice as bad now. I want to try and look at having them as a privilege. I am privileged to have lived long enough for this to plague me. (BUT ACTUALLY I HATE THEM!)

Well, anyway, happy 2025... I guess?? I have been in a terrible state of dread, anxiety, and depression since the American election in October. Seriously. I have had to up a dosage on my antidepressant for the second time in the span of nine months or so. 2024 was a terrible year for me -- its saving grace being the birth of my nephew.

I want desperately to quit social media. All social media. It's literally been awful for my mental health. Which, as you know, I often reference obliquely here... but in general, Cure Touch is a safe and gentle place for me, where I post things I like and that make me happy, and not a place where I post about my trials and tribulations. I will continue to focus on the little happy things here. I am just saying. I'm really struggling with being online in the current climate. I'm a big believer in curating your online experience as much as humanly possible. But it's become harder and harder to do that on a lot of platforms. They thrive on negativity and outrage, and they shovel that crap at you, whether you want to see it or not. I want to see posts by people I like and follow, and but most platforms now show you a lot of additional random posts/tweets/whatever, and I basically never want to see that stuff. It's riddled with slurs, racism, consumerism, and so much worse. There's never in the history of social media been any tweet or post that's made me say, "This platform is free! I can never leave it!" Nothing is that funny. Nothing makes the bad stuff worth wading through. And the way AI's being jammed down my gullet at every turn makes me so angry!

It's incumbent upon me to make this change for myself; I can't expect the platforms to improve. So. I'm really trying to limit my online exposure to stuff that makes me take point after point of psychic damage as I scroll. I want to fully quit... but then where will I see the latest pics of my blorbos??? I'm not kidding. I'm literally still hanging around these places so I can keep track of what Daniel Bruhl is up to, career-wise. And so I can see pics of him. Heheheh.

Unfortunately I dropped a lot of my usual hobbies during the last half of 2024: crocheting, sewing, Blythe, video projects, beading, journaling. So I haven't been up to anything I can share here.

Here is a list of things I've been relying on the last three months of poor mental health:

• Neopets. Yeah. I very abruptly took up Neopets. I'm a complete newbie and don't know what I'm doing. Neopets is incredibly ugly to me in every way, but the dailies give me something to do other than scroll. Every day I'm playin' Destruct-o-Match III.
• Playing the guitar. It is better for my mental health than even my medication, I think. I would like to post about this further, but I have been working very dedicatedly on filling out my guitar chord notebooks.
• Babysitting my nephew. I get to see him twice a week and it's the greatest. He fills me with so much peace and joy. Really, nothing else in this world can compare. When he smiles or babbles I am transported.
• Indulging in my hyperfixations. Primarily this has meant focusing on collecting some specific figurines. Ideally I will also post more about this.
• Writing "comfort fic." By this I mean writing very niche fanfiction for an audience of one: me. I don't care if I finish it. I don't care if it's bad. It has one purpose: to entertain and comfort me.

In a very exciting and random twist of fate, yesterday I adopted an EBL Blythe off Instagram!! She's on her way to me now. I'm really hopeful I can get back into Blythey stuff this year, just for my own pleasure. Getting a new (very old) doll is definitely one way to go about that!!

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