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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