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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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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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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doll stuff haul video

Hello! Been working on a doll stuff haul video these past few days! Amongst some stuff I've blogged about here already (like these benches and my beret obsession) are some new items like this yellow knit beret and these green daisy applique bellbottoms!

I really do try to keep it posi here, but CURRENTLY, I am so sick of my face/voice/personality/everything that I wanna barf. I almost trashed the footage for this video because I felt so awful about myself. Eventually I got over it and decided to just soldier on, because I had been waiting and wanting to film it for weeks. By the time I was done editing it and doing the subtitles for it and got it all thumbnailed and posted, I could not make myself post about it to Instagram. I almost didn't, but forced myself to do that, too. And now I am forcing myself to blog about it. What am I gonna do, spend days making this and then not post about it?

In therapy a few years ago I hit upon the idea of neutrality, especially with regards to myself. I can't do self-love or self-positivity. To me it's nothing short of delusional. But, what I can do is say, "While I'm not the best, I'm also not the worst." So right now I'm telling myself, I'm surely not the most irritating person on YouTube.

OR AM I?? Bonus Litten pic:

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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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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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