🗝️ chatelaines part 2 🗝️

Featuring the triumphant return of the twin mayors of birthday town: I made a couple more chatelaines for my girls! I wanted to make a silver one and a gold one, and here are Vesper and Citron to model them!

Lowdown on the silver one: Wow, I found some little tassels amongst my craft supplies that I got to attach to the miniature suitcases I made YEARS ago, and since there was an all-silver one, I thought, "Sure!" I don't know what the item could represent in terms of a tool or useful item for Citron, but hey, who knows. But upon further inspection of charms at the craft store (I went back to get more chains for these chatelaines) I actually found one that had tools, specifically! Two types of saws (I used one on here), hammers, wrenches. That's so funny to me. While the wrench might have been the most useful for an artificer-type gal, I liked the shape of the saw the most! I believe this one is a hacksaw, specifically! And I found a fork charm at a local bead store, as well as whatever the one on the rightmost in the photo is. I don't know what exactly this is, other than a drop-style charm, but in my imagination, this could be some kind of scent pot or holder for some little tool or gadget!

Again, I used a gear for the medallion portion of the chatelaine, and just jump ring-ed it on.

For the gold chatelaine: Another local bead store finding, but there is this little gold clasp-looking charm, and I don't rightly know what it is. But it looked like some sort of pocketbook or a cover for a notebook, so that's what I'm pretending it is. (It might be a clasp, but I'm really not sure.) There's also a clock hand from the gear packet, and a colorful charm from the Explorer packet I got for my first chatelaine. Also, I made a little keyring out of a jump ring and several small key charms from a packet I got at Michael's. Even though the keys aren't bright gold, I still felt like it gives the chatelaine a more lived-in, vintage and useful look, instead of just being fancier-seeming items.

I didn't put a medallion on this chatelaine since I didn't really have anything I liked for that.

But here's Vesper's full 'fit...

As you know, I like more elegant looks for Vesper. Things that make her look, dare I say, elfin! While nothing will ever look as beautiful as her stock, which to me is exquisite, this outfit gives her the vibe that she is the keeper of a little fairy garden. One surrounded by a rock wall; one with an ancient well hidden within, which may or may not be a wishing well. She strolls and tends to the flowers in the fairy garden.

I don't think I listed all the outfit deets for Citron in my last chatelaine post, so I will do that now!

Vesper's deer headband: made by me
Vesper's leaf crown: made by me
Vesper's peplum top: Sugar Mag (I got it in 2010 off eBay)
Vesper's skirt: CraftyCoraShop on Etsy
Vesper's shoes: her own stock

Citron's goggles: her own stock
Citron's black blouse: HelloCoolCat
Citron's skirt: CraftyCoraShop
Citron's shoes: Time After Alice's stock shoes

Finally: "the twin mayors of birthday town" is an old My Brother, My Brother, and Me reference (I was an early MBMBAM adopter back in the day, and also an early MBMBAM abandoner, haha) and when I Googled it just now to find the episode I was referencing, the first result was not MBMBAM, but my own blog post about Vesper and Citron??? Whoa. Wild. Real snake-eating-its-own-tail stuff.

Read More

Fey's modern life

WOW, I adore Fey. Dang, she's just so cute with her Licca body. It gives her such a whimsical air, with that head-tilt. And gosh. I just. FBLs...

I'm still just so sad the mold is not being produced any longer, even though that's been the case for a very long time now. I have seven FBL girls, and I think eighteen total were produced. That's quite a lot of FBLs and I sometimes wonder if I will ever get another. To me, their faces are so incredibly sweet. Any FBL would be very loved here at Chez Maidensuit.

ANYWAY, I made each little piece of this outfit, except the shoes, which came from thehandflower -- but those, I did paint! They were just plain blue but I painted the laces and rubber bits white myself! I crocheted the earband, sewed the crop top, and made the little skirt back in 2023 expressly for Fey! This fabric is so fun and odd. The background color is kind of a sickly pinky-beige (... a good descriptor for me tbh) but it has these great blue and mint shapes that are sort of 80s or early 90s! Kinda new wave-y or Pee Wee's Playhouse or something? The color palette's very Rocko's Modern Life, actually. It reminds me of a matching pink sweatshirt/stirrup-pant combo I had circa age 10 that had little geometric shapes on it.

FEY T_T Just look at that FACE! Like a couple of my other girls' hair (thinking of Gavin specifically) it has sort of yellowed with age, but I don't mind that it leans a skosh more green than blue these days. I think that is the case for a lot of brighter Takara hair.

I like this tiny corner of my back porch, by the way. The mossy patina and chipped paint and dirt and weeds and everything. I always love pictures taken here. It's in the background of the header pic up at the top of my blog.

By the way, Fey brought you a drink. She wants you to stay hydrated. And she wants you to know the Feytorade matches her shoes.

(The drink mini is from the Teeny Tinies! Gamer Essentials playset, which came with amazing junk food options.)

Read More

🚨 emergency chatelaine post 🚨

I made Citron a chatelaine!!! And I'm only calling it an emergency because posting about it is knocking other doll dressup posts further back in my post queue, haha!

Let's talk chatelaines without me being anywhere near a historical fashion expert. They're basically belts (more usually belt clips) from which dangle useful items a woman might want to carry around with her. These, to me, are an exquisite combination and function and beauty. What your own personal chatelaine might hold was very relative to who you were and what you might need on you at any given time, and they did range in, say, fanciness. I found this page on chatelaines useful for not just explaining the concept of a chatelaine but also its accessories.

(I sourced all these images from Google Images, so they're a mix of extant historical examples and costume recreations!)

Objects one might find on a chatelaine: a pocket watch, keys, scissors, knives, hooks, sewing supplies such as tape measurers, pencils encased in a tube-like holder, notepads, dog whistles, scent/perfume containers, smelling salts, a little purse for some coins or a hankie or something. You could trick out a chatelaine to be hobby-specific, even. Tote along all your needlework stuff on your needlework chatelaine! Are you a lady who needs a magnifying glass multiple times a day? Keep yours with you on the ol' chatelaine.

Inspired the by the various sizes of jump rings Anne gifted me, I decided to make Citron a chatelaine, and to have it be steampunk in style. I got the following additional supplies for it:

Just a couple of cheap $2 chains (one is silver and the links are shaped like hearts and the other is black) so I could harvest some links and also their clasps. I found some gear ephemera ("inclusions," the packaging says) and also a charm set ("Explorer Charms," it says) that I got particularly for the sun and moon charms. I also bought a set of tools with some pliers and cutters, since I didn't have anything like that already, which was half the cost of my purchase. But worth it, if I explore any more crafting of this sort! I couldn't have succeeded at this without them!

I decided I wanted to lean into a mixed metal look instead of an all-silver or all-black look so her chatelaine could go with any dressup. And despite my best efforts to try and find tiny charms of useful things, tools of any variety, I couldn't find anything in my local craft stores like that. No charms of scissors, knives, science equipment. Most of the charms, intended for human-sized jewelry, were on the larger-to-unusable side in terms of scale, anyway. So I just decided that it's alright if this chatelaine doesn't exactly offer Citron useful items. I did manage to find a key charm that came with a set of beads I bought off Amazon in 2022 -- such a lucky find for this project!

This was, for the most part, a super easy and quick make that I really enjoyed! I just snipped off the end of one of those chains to act as my belt, used several jump rings from Anne to attach charms to small lengths of chains harvested from the bigger lengths, and also used jump rings to attach the small lengths to the main belt. I did attempt to vary the length of chain from which each charm was dangling so I could get that satisfying drape of objects, but I think this was sometimes not noticeable because the size of each charm differed greatly.

Charms used: the tarnished-gold sun charm from the pack I purchased, the silver key charm I already have, a black gear from the gear inclusions pack, and a bronze clock handle charm also from the gear inclusions pack!

For the medallion at the top of the chatelaine, I superglued three gears from the pile of gear inclusions together and attached them onto the belt with jump rings. I thought that'd be better than just supergluing it onto the chain, in case I ever wanted to change it out again. And also because superglue is a FREAKING MESS. I already accidentally damaged my cutting mat during the process of gluing the gears together, hahaha. Lesson learned, there, but I just didn't want to superglue the medallion to the belt. For whatever reason, attaching the medallion to the chain acting as the belt was the hardest part of the whole project. It was so fiddly and wrangling all the chains to hang in the proper place while the medallion got hooked on took the most time of anything!!

BUT I DID IT! The mixed metals steampunk mini-chatelaine of Citron's dreams. Or rather, my dreams. Maybe Batman's dreams, too.

I feel like I could have made this into more of a belt clip situation with something like a pin back glued to the "medallion" made of gears. And I maybe could make the attachment of the medallion to the belt chain cleaner by sewing it on?? It might be less visible than the jump rings, and still temporary. There might be several better methods of construction in general, indeed.

Still, despite the fiddly-ness and the feeling that I could have constructed something more "accurate" or something, I'm super happy because I want to outfit Citron with fun stuff like this. I feel like I will definitely attempt another chatelaine! For her, and maybe also one for Vesper?? Doing an all-silver or all-gold one would be satisfying, and seeing if I can locate some tinier and more specific charms on Etsy seems satisfying too!

Read More

neons of time

These pics of Citron make me want to SCREAM! I was making pterodactyl noises editing them. The editing on them is super minimal. Just boosted levels of saturation and a tiny color correction layer to try and reflect true colors. But ohhh my goodness. What a gorgeous girl. She is a Blythe I sincerely cannot believe I own. Scream, scream, scream!

Citron is one of the handful of girls I have where I am somewhat particular and picky about how I dress her, and feel I have only put her in a 'fit that I really like on her a couple of times. Like, my dressup success rate with Citron is middling at best. I really, really want to lean into more historical dress elements with her.

Here are a couple of pictures of her in other 'fits from elsewhere on my blog:

As per my Blythe family page blurb re: Citron: I have grandiose ideas [on how to dress her] but very little wardrobe to support them. Keywords: Lucca from Chrono Trigger, fire magic, metallics, vintage adventurer (think Rachel Maksy), Gibson Girl. I want to absolutely indulge in the steampunk elements of SV's concept when I can. There are so many aesthetic elements of steampunk that I love, but also there's a lot of goofy, overly exaggerated aspects of steampunk that I would like to shy away from, if possible. Liiiike the goofy top hat that's part of SV's stock!

Maybe another mood board is warranted...

Particularly of note in this mood board:

• As noted, Rachel Maksy
• Anne Shirley
• Bree from Outlander
• Chrono Trigger
• the Antikythera mechanism which I have been obsessed with for years (name-dropped it here in 2013)
• this pretty art piece

I have a few blouses and a few long skirts that I can put on Citron, but I'd love, for instance: a vest or something that resembles stays, a chatelaine type of rig (maybe I could make something like that out of jump rings and charms?), maybe some kind of other eyewear that insinuates steampunk??

All that aside, this is a super duper simple dressup, but I love this dress on her, wow! I love the tone of gray and I love the square neckline. In person it actually cuts across the plastic swells of the doll's breasts in a Regency gown type of way that looks appropriately historical for her!

The dress from MissFreyaJ (whose shop seems to only sell eyechip sheets and not clothes now -- I purchased this dress way back in 2013 and you can see it on Plummery in this old post). She's wearing Time After Alice's stock shoes, which match her dark blue nails!

Haha, well, I am going to be posting more batches of doll pics in the next few days, so!! Buckle up, baby. I think posting doll pics every day (or at least on the reg) is more of an Instagram thing, and I might post a small round-up of all the pics I've taken lately there eventually. But honestly, I just prefer blogging 'cause I wanna yap and do mood boards and stuff. I'm trying not to feel self-conscious about a) yapping a lot, and b) posting a lot. I used to post EVERY DAY here, once upon a time!

Read More

The Cranberries - Dreams.mp3

I did a load of doll-dressing yesterday. As you might recall, I undressed ALL twenty-one of my girls back in November, and have been slowly dressing them one or two at a time since. I had nine girls dressed, but twelve still standing around naked. I got some kind of bee in my bonnet, I guess, because last night I dressed all twelve of those girls! I don't mind saying it took a few hours. I wasn't even being super picky or trying on/rejecting lots of things. I just enjoyed each dressup, brushed out a few girls' hair, took a while to get out/put away again all of my dolly wardrobe stuff. (I have so much, after fifteen years of collecting.)

One of the first dressups I did was to put Holland in this 90s-ish babydoll dress from PrettyBomb, which I got FOREVER ago, in 2023; I included it in a haul video where I even said, "With a pair of combat boots and knee high socks?? Please." I decided to finally execute the look I was envisioning! I found some yellow knee-high socks in my stash and fortunately I had some black boots without heels.

I wanted to try and make a mood board to see if I could represent the exact 90s fashion moment I was recalling...

This was actually way more time-consuming than it should have been, because the internet doesn't want to show actual 90s fashion pictures when you look up "90s babydoll dress," et cetera. It wants to show you Gen-Z's ideas of what 90s fashion surely was, which is mostly inaccurate and what I would call "tumblr soft grunge" at best. I'm not mad at Gen-Z for this, though. I definitely think they should feel free to take 90s trends and do their own versions, incorporate them into a "now" look; the 90s did that with the 1970s, after all. Every fashion cycle revisits/reinterprets its predecessors. But it's really hard to find actual 90s images for some reason.

The 90s was my childhood (I turned 7 in 1990, and 17 come the year 2000) and I remember veryyy distinct phases of fashion as the decade went on. 1992 fashion (think Full House, still reminiscent of the 80s) does not look like 1998 fashion (think post-grunge: Spice Girls, baby tees, Madonna's "Ray of Light."). You weren't going to find Blossom hats past a certain year (in fact I've never seen anyone revisit Blossom hats -- only bucket hats). Early 90s and late 90s fashion are completely different!

The look I'm going for with Holland here is more early/mid-90s, maybe 1994-ish. Pre-Delia's catalogues. Pre-Hanson. I remember the celestial themes (what might now be called whimsigoth) and the Zodiac motifs all the Claire's jewelry had; the yin-yangs and the smiley faces. Chokers were "in" but those tattoo chokers were not a thing yet. I recall all the Nirvana/Loony Tunes/D.A.R.E. tees and plaid shirts and Vans and baggy jeans (pre-JNCOs). I had plaid babydoll dresses and wore scuzzy navy blue Converse high tops that I'd written/drawn all over. I recall the sheer knee-highs (a la Clueless, hence the inclusion of Cher on the mood board) and Doc Martens and the grunge/skater influence. Even feminine styles had a lot of that grunge influence with more masculine notes. The pink Power Ranger was wearing floral babydoll dresses paired with biking shorts and hiking boots, okay! DJ freaking Tanner looked like a construction worker with a cute bob and a choker.

All that about accuracy and stuff being said, I don't think of this hairstyle as 90s at all, but I don't want to disturb Holland's curls! At the same time, I really wanted to dress Holland in this dress. And I just had these bits of black yarn hanging around because I took them out of Zasha's hair. So, I am just a hypocrite.

Anyway, if I could add a single thing to this outfit, it would be either a little plaid shirt to tie around her waist or a denim vest. Often outfits in this era of the 90s were very bedecked with accessories; lots of silver jewelry, buttons and pins. I think she could use some more visual interest/clutter like that, but I'm not sure what...

Get ready for more doll outfit posts. I took some pics of Citron and Tiphanie today too.

Read More

miniature pillows (or, the care and feeding of my soul)

Yesterday I was feeling pretty heavy and discombobulated, after a few vexing days -- on top of Everything Happening In The World, you know. It has lately felt like life consists of little other than the endless grind of stuff I really don't want to do, but have to do anyway, and unpleasantness, and worry. I knew I needed to do something fun. Something for me and not for other people. So I decided to make some little pillows for my doll furniture. I'm in a miniatures phase right now and recently reacquainted myself with the other little cushions and crochet blankets I made in years past. I've only made a few cushions, actually!! I think three? So I decided I need to make scads more!

I found this floral fabric with a very small scale (so satisfying when you're working with doll stuff!!) in my stash and also remembered that last year my wonderful friend Anne sent me a whole little box full of really fun sewing/crafting notions! Miniature buttons in every imaginable color, lots of trims of various sorts, little silk flowers, jump rings -- even more than I can name off the top of my head. It was so exciting to bust out all these extra materials and find the ideal pom-pom trim!! The olive color matched the tiny leaves in this floral fabric PERFECTLY!

So, I intended to make a square pillow and a round pillow. Figuring out how to add the pompom trim to a pillow kind of blew my little dumb sewing mind. I began to sew it on but realized belatedly that once I turned the pillow right-side-out to stuff, the trim would be stuck on the inside of the pillow. Order of operations in sewing really matters and I have messed this up on many occasions in the past. So I ended up just finishing sewing on the trim to one of my circles of fabric and deciding it could be a little tablecloth of some sort!

It fits this little antique store wicker table pretty exactly! (For the circle shapes I was using, I literally traced around the bottom of a can of cranberry sauce. Use what you got!)

On the second go at the round pillow, I managed to figure out the method needed to sew the pompom trim between my two fabric circles. It was sort of tough when it came time to turn the pillow out properly and stuff it, because I had about an inch of pompom trim to tuck between the now right-side-out fabric layers and also I needed to try and fold the fabric layers in on themselves as well. It made for a very rough patch of visible stitching (in the picture below you can see it along the bottom of the pillow) because I don't really know stitches or techniques to better deal with this kind of thing. I think it is neither noticeable nor important, haha. These little pillows are just photography/video/setup props.

On the square pillow, I randomly decided to attach an applique I found in my stash. I got a bunch of these little miniature doily appliques from the Michael's dollar section ten years ago (at least) and I still have a few packets of them. I was going to pop a button in the middle of the pillow anyway, because I like that look, and decided to make the button the middle of the flower shape. Eeee!

I just had myself the best little time sewing yesterday. I kept thinking, "I am just having the time of my life right now!" It was such a profound balm to my sore and ragged soul.

I've mentioned this a couple of times, I feel like (here and there), but it is difficult to thrive amongst continuous news cycles and social media algorithms that bury you in bad news on the daily. That is by design, because scary and negative things get a lot of attention. More views, more clicks, more discussion. One way people try to protect themselves and deal with scary things is by knowing everything possible, to feel prepared and in-the-know about the latest horrific development in the news or in more random internet rabbitholes -- whatever. But then their algorithms get trained to feed them more of that stuff, until it feels like the entire world is a horror show consisting of nothing but awful people and conspiracies and the latest thing certain evil people said. I'm not strictly talking politics, although that's a huge part of it. But even seemingly positive things like staying self-educated with regards to health topics can get twisted by the algorithm into health fear-mongering and distrust in medical professionals, et cetera. Most people aren't being careful with what they digest online, or considering their sources.

I have a couple of family members sucked into this type of self-perpetuating engine. Constantly sucking down soul poison. I do care about the state of the world and about my fellow humans; I care about corruption and injustice and evil. And I will vote against them, and protest against them, and live my life according to the things I believe are good and right. But just don't want to think about and discuss the latest alarming development in an ongoing bad news cycle every single day. I just can't inject myself with soul-killing stuff on the daily. Maybe a lot of people are stronger than me and can do that without huge mental health ramifications. But I can't. I have to want to live in this world. I have to live in a brain, a body, that works against me and tells me enough bad things already. I have to use my limited time on this planet in a way that makes me glad to be here. If I'm not feeding my soul, if I am not nourishing it with the things it needs, then it is not just sitting around, stalling in neutral, unharmed. No. It is getting constantly worn down and damaged by outside forces and it will ultimately wither and die. I have to, I have to, take care of it. Or else what is the POINT of anything.

I am expressing this here instead of just dropping a fun little post with some pics and vamoosing because Cure Touch is entirely emblematic, to me, of my constant, consistent choice to try and center any joy I can for myself. I have needed it for that purpose since its inception. And I need to reiterate its purpose now. And my purpose. To myself, if almost no one else. For a long while now my about page has stated: "I believe creating and defining happiness for yourself, and in maintaining a healthy relationship with online content." I wrote that, I'm pretty sure, ten-plus years ago. Curating and being intentional with the online sphere has only become more vital. It has become harder, too.

And I am posting all this with this post because I am being so serious and for real when I say that making little pillows for my doll furniture was so good for my soul. It made me so happy. I was hurting for something like this activity.

I am going to make some more soon.

Read More