lofty ambitions part 1

So I know I said that I felt like doing some more doll-dressing, but what I actually ended up doing is taking off all my dolls' clothes. All twenty-one Neos are standing around nakedly in my room this past week.

I did this because:

• I wanted a blank slate for all the girls. Some of them have been wearing the same 'fits for a really long time (over a year) because I liked them, and I just realized all of a sudden, "I'm never going to want to change some of these outfits, but I should anyway."
• I wanted to see every single pair of shoes I have, specifically!
• I wanted to see if I had proper storage, still. All my dolls being totally undressed is a thing that never happens, really, but I wanted to see the state of my storage options. I need to change some of what I'm doing; boxes are overflowing as it is.
• I wanted to see if all my girls had underwear. A couple don't! I don't strictly think they need panties. Some things fit better without that layer in the way, taking up valuable space. But I also irrationally don't want any of them to feel less loved because they don't have undies. Hahaha.
• Just really want to do Blythey stuff right now. I want to do dressups I've never done before. Revisit my doll wardrobe and find pieces I've never used (I have many, haha) and use them, finally. Maybe even declutter??

I kind of had fun grouping my girls somewhat, as I put them all back where I keep them (atop my desk and on a ladder shelf). All the blondies and peachies. The gingers. The sandies/brunettes. I love seeing new (old) girls like Olive betwixt Fey and Zasha. I love seeing Lamb and Holland side by side -- those curly girlies. It's inspiring me. And the utter hilarity of Klara and Tiphanie sitting on the same bench when they have scads of hair that fells them so easily...

So, I'm going to have to dress all these girls again, when I hardly have the time to even do so right now! Because I am trying to do a lot of stuff right now. So as ridiculous as that sounds: Dressing all these gals again officially falls under the heading of Lofty Ambitions. I'll post about another Lofty Ambition I am undertaking quite soon. I feel insane for trying to load more onto my plate these days, when I have sort of bitten off more than I can chew already.

Finally -- and this has nothing to do with any of the rest of this post -- I did some light Halloweening with some cat ears and makeup for a family party. My mom took this pic of me and my nephew, who has grown so much lately. He is fifteen months old, a big boy who has started walking and can say "hello," "bye-bye," "kitty," and "night-night," and I have been treasuring time with him especially of late because he and his parents are moving a few states away in just a few days time. So this is just an addendum of a memory, for my own enjoyment.

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family portrait 2024

Yooo! Class picture!

I've actually gotten a few requests for an updated family portrait in the last couple of years, but even with five less dolls than I have now, I have been like, "I have no idea how to accomplish such a thing..."

I used to take my dolls out into the backyard and pose them on a bench we had, but we don't have the bench anymore, and ~20 dolls makes a quick hike to the backyard not terribly feasible anyway. It took long enough with seven dolls, and now I have just one shy of twenty. You might not think it's a lot of work to wrangle them, but just moving them across my bedroom to line them up here took sooo long.

(I know that people have far larger Blythe collections and manage to photograph all their dolls at once, but I don't know how these people do it!! Lots of time?)

For this, I turned some plastic storage boxes upside down in order to create a riser, like this is choir class, and draped the boxes in fabric so they wouldn't be too distracting. The dolls aren't in any particular order per se, except that the back row is RBLs, the middle row is FBLs, and the front row is RBLs again. Also, Aury is in front because of course she is!! The newer dolls are in front just by virtue of having been farther away from the desk, and so the last to be placed on it.

There was nothing on god's green earth I could do to keep the dolls' hair from sticking to each other and falling in their faces. I tried to fix Gavin's hair so many times, but it just wouldn't cooperate! So, what you see is what you get, in terms of all that doll hair.

Speaking, you might notice that Drew has her original scalp back on, even though the fading on it is so atrocious.

As a bonus, I have a couple of other group pics to share:

The redheads! The gingers, really, as Fidelia is certainly a redhead too. I have been seriously wanting a little pic of all my gingers together since I got Citron!

Also:

The blondes! Are you seeing these ringlets on Holland??

I thought of breaking down the family into groups by hair color and doing a whole series of portraits, but the rubric breaks down by the time it reaches dolls like Gavin and Miette. I didn't want to have a group I was mentally thinking of as "the leftovers." I know they are just inanimate objects and cannot care, but I still would have felt bad! So I stopped here.

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who is she?

So Drew's blue hair is just simply no longer blue. It used to be a really lovely shade, as you can see on Kate Hardin/Moofala's Flickr stream. It's now a strange, extremely muted purple-tinged reddish color (kinda-sorta pictured here, last year). The pigment has faded in a very patchy, streaky way, so it's an uneven color as well.

Twice I've tried to dye it blue again with RIT dye, but the dye will quite simply not take, and I really don't know enough about the dyeing process to understand why that is. So I went shopping for new hair for Drew. I found no blue scalps that I liked, but I did like this mossy green bob, so I got it.

What do you think? I'm of two minds.

On the posi side:

• I do love this particular shade of green, and the fact that it's a bob with some fun curl. I really like Lady Panacea's green hair, and I don't have any girls with green hair, so this is a unique color amongst my Blythe family, as well as a unique hairstyle.
• Also, the hair is very nice to comb. It's very silky and soft.
• It's just REALLY nice to have Drew back together. She's been disassembled for a year, since I was trying to dye her scalp, and this took me a while to do.

On the other hand:

• I am very unaccustomed to this color on Drew (whom I've had for ten years), and so it is both cute and very jarring. Drew's always been my little blue girl.
• "Drew" is a very blue/purple name. I have color-grapheme synesthesia, so letters, numbers, days, and months have colors for me. Ds are purple, Es are blue. So it feels like, "But her NAME is the wrong color now." Ws are, admittedly, grass green. But I still see the name Drew as an indigo color.
• Drew has a sort of muted, slate-blue eyeshadow look, complete with lids of that color. Just for me personally, when that's matched with this green, it isn't my favorite look.
• This is silly, but I prefer whatever plastic Takara uses (... used!), texture-wise. It isn't nearly as shiny or slippery or soft. So this feels extremely different to the touch. It's not that this hair isn't nice, because it is. Rather, it's just a tactile thing that signals to me, "This isn't Takara hair."
• This hair is very voluminous, and thus it is quite wide. To me this is a very Japanese hairstyle, in that I used to see it on mori girls back in the day.

So, I am as of yet unsettled. I like it and yet I find it jarring. I think I am somewhat in mourning over her original blue hair, even though it's been faded for a number of years now.

I have options!

I might keep looking for scalps that are a Drew-ish color of blue. Or I could keep attempting to get her old scalp all fixed up. (I don't know how to do this!)

Another option is to get her faceup refreshed -- or even do that work myself -- so her lids and eyeshadow are a color that really complements the heck outta this green. A beautiful brown, maybe? I could get a new eye mech and brown lashes, gently sand off the blue shadow on her faceplate and do a brown lids/shadow combination, and replace her pair of dark blue chips with an attractive green pair.

But will she still be Drew then? I mean, yes, of course, but. She will have this whole different look. It's not that it's not a cute look, but also, Who Even Is This Doll... 

Change is very jarring and distressing for me, so I think I'm fretting just because of that.

(BTW this one of the headbands I've needle felted recently!)

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I've had quarantine brain for years now.

Boo!

Did I scare you? Don't worry; it's just me.

I have to say, it's been so long that I don't remember how to blog. But I wanted to post, if only for the shock value.

It's also been a long time since I made a doll hat!  I made this one last night and even though it's also been literal years since I've taken a single dang picture of a Blythe, I really wanted to take a picture and post it. I am just kinda pleased with it.

I made it because I needle felted these mushrooms and my old sickness flared up. "I wanna put these on a pixie hat!"

It was already dusk out when I took these pictures, so Drew looks quite wan. (She also looks wan because her hair, previously denim blue, has faded quite a lot over the last year or two. Now it's a strange reddish-purple. But I have attained some Rit dye, so I will hopefully fix her up sometime soon. Also Drew is not generally dressed in a mori style -- or as they call it these days, "cottagecore" -- so she is a bit unrecognizable right now.) I didn't want to wait for better light in case I decided in the meantime that it wasn't exciting enough to take pics of.

Although these pics are a bit washed out, I like this little hat. The yarn is a pretty dark blue-green and it looks striking with the brown tone of the mushrooms. I also added three wooden beads on the opposite side to balance it out. I considered doing a lot more decorating but am a little rusty... Historically I have done large pom-pons on the end of hat ties, but I did these comparatively modest ones.

(Can I just say that it's been so long since I made a pixie hat that I DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE PATTERN? That's wild, because I've made at least 200 hats in this pattern over the years. I had to sit down and figure out how to do it all over again.)

I might post again soon! Or I might not! Who can say where the road goes? Where the day flows? Only time.

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somewhere deep inside of these bones

What? I can't believe October is over. :( I was looking forward to this month for ages, and it has drained away from under my feet so fast.

I spent most of the month writing. Joy! Joy! Joy!!! Writing is the thing I treasure the most in my life. I would choose it over every other hobby I have. But it also the most difficult hobby I pursue, and the most touch and go even when I am at my best. I haven't written in over a year, and not seriously in a couple of years. So I'm shocked that I've been managing some hardcore writing when my state of mind feels so diminished and my energy levels at an all-time low and have just been limping through everything in life. In some way, it is like a safety net that has caught me at the bottom of this months-long freefall, I think. Or maybe it's like one sense growing stronger when all the other ones have been lost.

After thirty days of this business, my brain feels like a stripped tire. A scooped melon. A mere husk. This is pretty normal around the 30k words mark for me. I've taken a couple of days off here at the tail end of October in the hopes I can recharge a bit, because in November, I'm participating in a writing challenge on Habitica alongside my party, some of whom are writing for NaNoWriMo. I'm not doing NaNoWriMo myself, but a daily goal is very helpful for me at this point in my story.

Realizing that my ability to write will eventually click away again, as per usual, is excruciatingly sad a thought for me right now, but I'm grateful that I wrote even once this month, let alone so many days in a row with such dedication and concentration. It is a gift that I have been treasuring.

This month, I have also a) temporarily joined my mother's church choir because they are singing for an Evensong service "Cantique de Jean Racine," which I sang in high school and still know, and b) taken a knitting lesson. Still rubbish at knitting. Still barely an alto.

Anyway, here's a picture of Drew.

Drew has been wearing this little periwinkle-ish number Anne made me for a few weeks, and I made this hat in August, or something like that. All this purple is quite unusual for any of my girls to be decked out in!

When I took her outside earlier, I saw that her RIT-dyed hair is starting to really fade a lot. I think I may contact the woman who customized her (who lives in the same city as me! Last I checked, anyway) to get it fixed, because I don't know that I feel up to re-dyeing it myself. But it will have to wait till 2017, I think. I already know my budget is going to be tight as can be this holiday season.

Now I'm going to spend the remainder of my Halloween evening by singing "Jack's Lament," finishing this hat, and perhaps watching some Supernatural.

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video: Get Drew Ready With Me!

New Dolly Dressup vidja!


Beatrix was next in line to be dressed, but she recently got this really cute vintage Ken doll sweater from eBay and I couldn't wait to put it on her. She looks so cute, I don't want to undress her just yet!

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New family portrait!

(click here to embiggen!)

From left to right: Gavin, Lamb, Aury, Klara, Mallow, Bonnet (the Middie), Clarke, Plummery, Petaline, Beatrix, Fey, and Drew!

It was about darn time for new family portrait, seeing as how it's been a little over a year since the last! Oh my gosh. Toting eleven Neos (and a Middie) out into June heat, trying to find shade, is quite an undertaking. And now that I have so many girls, they're kind of hard to fit into a line up-style picture! There I was, taking picture after picture where Aury looked like she was about to fall over, and I didn't even see it in real life.

It is definitely amazing to see how my gaggle of girls has grown over the past four years. They each have special memories attached. Some were gifts (Plummery, Petaline and Lamb were given to me by friends!); some have traveled with me; some have been my muses; some had technical difficulties; some have been deboxed on YouTube; some have been called particularly creepy; almost all have worked as models for Etsy.

And it all started with my Ice Rune, Aury. I love her so much. My favoritism is absolutely blatant. If my house was on fire, she is the one thing I'd grab to rescue.

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grannies, continued

I started crocheting these mustard-and-white granny squares at a friend's house during May. Making granny squares is rhythmic, relaxing, and doesn't take very long. Perfect to do while watching TV or listening to a podcast! I did perhaps 18 or so that weekend, and kept the yarn sitting on my desk for when I felt like doing some more. Now I have 62.

As you can see (pardon my "foots," as Bob Ross might call them), that's actually not very much, all laid out. I do have small feet, but I would estimate I need double -- if not more -- the amount of squares for a little throw. As these don't take very long and are a pleasure to make, that doesn't sway me a bit! It's joining them that I find daunting...

Drew is dressed to match! She's like my little mood board/muse for this throw in progress.

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I'm a fool for April

Dressed up all my Blythes for a family portrait! Lamb (second to right) fits right in. Alas for Bonnet, I am not too great at taking pictures of Middies.

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indigo girls

Drew and I looked kind of twinny today.

I'm mostly a natural girl. I don't wear makeup very often and I've never had dyed hair, except for some Manic Panic in high school, aeons ago. But since I've been needing a hair cut for a long time (it was down to the small of my back, when long hair stops being "pretty" long and starts veering into "creepy religious hairstyle" long for me), I decided to ask my hairstylist aunt for a trim and to bleach some streaks into my hair so I could put some random cotton candy pink in. She sweetly one-upped that, gave me a style shorter than I've had in years, and put some temporary indigo in so I could have some bright unnatural color in there while I was waiting for my pink dye!

This is a super reflective color (I practically have a purple halo when I am in sunlight, but it looks blue sometimes and violet other times) and with my super pale skin and very dark hair, I can look very easily gothy. But this isn't too much for me, as long as I don't fill my eyebrows too dark or go overboard on the eyeliner, and it will wash out so I can put in my pink.

It's really perked my spirits for my hair to be less weighty and to do something fun and random with it.

Wow, Drew, I feel such a connection with you right now, my little blue girl!

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Blythe goals

My gang of Blythe dolls standing in a row atop my desk has really been a source of great joy for me the past several years. They truly make me happy when I look up at them, and it can be relaxing for me just to spend time looking at them.

It's fun for me to style them and take pictures of them too, but they often reflect my aesthetics and current color passions, so I derive strange joy from just having them standing around and also being really particular and fussy with the way I have each girl dressed.

When I go places, sometimes I sneak a girl with me like a talisman of strength, or just a friend. I like to have one standing or sitting by me when I'm crafting. I like to make little hats for them, so they give me something to do with my hands. If I didn't have dolls to make hats for... well, boxes of other things I've made are still sitting around in my room, so in my nightmarescape my room would look much more like an episode of Hoarders waiting to happen.

So Blythes for me are a creative outlet, and also like art/decor and comfort objects all at once. I don't consider myself a collector, even though by now they number enough to be considered a collection; I just think of them as my Blythe family and I have such an affection for each one. I even had a dream about Beatrix last night!

Anyway, even when I haven't changed half of them in a month (or sometimes several months if I really like the way they're dressed), I enjoy them literally every day. I want to indulge myself in some focus after a year of spending a lot of my free time writing, and not buying too many dolly duds or taking too many pictures. So I have a little list of "Blythe goals," or just things I'd really like to do in the coming year...

Easy:

• do ADAD for a month (I'm thinking February or March)
• find a charm for Mallow's pullstring
• buy some more tights, socks, and separates
• give Gavin and Mallow a spa day
• new family portrait to include Lamb!

Medium:

• sew another felt A-line dress
• knit another hat!
• finally, finally do a closet cleanout on Blythe Kingdom... why is this so hard??

Laughably Ambitious:

• really make my dumb DIY lightbox more usable
• make a little scale doll room/diorama
• get a faceup for Bonnet and possibly Gavin

I have no hard, fast goals -- besides very definitely picking a month to do ADAD and sticking to it, no matter how boring I feel my pictures are or if I'm totally nocturnal and have no light -- but lots of thoughts/shoulds!

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Ripple Throw Progress Report: three-quarters there

(Pardon my pajamas and feet.)

Yes, it's That Time. The time for me to bask in the ever-increasing glow of my ripple blanket. It really is quite the beast now! I would guess it's about 70-75% of the way done. It's very warm and heavy. As the weather grows warmer, it becomes a sweaty sort of affair to work on, covering my lap and legs as completely as it does. There are cooler days here and there, or evenings when the air conditioner is on, and I like to work on it then.

So far it's about four feet tall, and getting hard to take pictures of.

Here are some visual aids...

Currently I need to buy one more skein of yarn (I'm using three different whites, although I'm not sure you can tell, and I want them to feel evenly distributed between snow white, dull white, and cream) and then I think from there the goal will just be to keep going till I'm out of the yarn I have left, and call it done! I estimate a couple more feet or so! It's all by ear, so whatever works out is pretty fine with me. This has been such a fun project for me so far. I hardly ever do things bigger than little Blythe hats. I have liked having a pet project that I can pick up and feel like I've made progress on, even if it's one stripe here and seven there.

Today's delights:

• nachos - yummm
• springy, stormy weather
• doing hard burn on a writing project! Tunnel vision!!

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Leap Day William

Happy Leap Day!

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Drew in Photoshopland

It's pretty irresistible to dress up a Blythe girl a la Alice! Drew's wearing Very Vicky's stock blouse and skirt and Mary Janes, Simply Peppermint's stock headband, some black and white striped tights from the BK sundries section, and a super-hilarious pinafore I once "sewed."

I guess it's the impending month of October but I feel like dressing my girls up in costumes! Drew is Alice right now and Aury's an owl!

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brides of Burton

Gavin and Drew are rocking the black and white stripes lately. With their pale matte faces, it's very Burtony!

Gavin's wearing a dress nicked from her cousin Clementine and glasses nicked from Beatrix, Tailor Gibson's stock blouse beneath that, purple heart tights, and Punkaholic People's stock shoes, a recent score from Blythe Kingdom. Drew is wearing a lacy white Sugar Mag dress and a pair of black and white striped tights, also BK scores, Gavin's bunny boots, and a lovely black and white hat knit by my best friend E. E, we love your hats!

The Burton-esque-ness must mean I am in the mood for autumn already... around September/October, I always get in the mood for Sleepy Hollow in particular! (Yep, I mentioned this last year too!) It's funny, I'm not into Tim Burton as a rule, but I just adore Sleepy Hollow because of the atmosphere and costuming and Katrina's dresses. Gavin has always reminded me of a platinum-haired Tim Burton character anyway...!

I've had Gavin for almost a year now! I got her last September. Time sure flies!

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March family portrait

I finally had a new family portrait session!! I have been a bit nuts about color-coordination in my girls' outfits as of late, so I kept putting it off and putting it off because it didn't look right somehow? I cannot help it, I just get like this about things that are next to each other much of the time. There's a lot of green, some yellow and brown, and pink happening. Frankly I am proud I didn't compulsively dress them all in yellow head-to-toe. (Although that sounds fun... I don't think I have enough yellow dresses.)

Looking forward to April!

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#WINNING

Expecting tons of Blythe stuff in the mail, mostly scavenged from the lovely sundries section of BK. These yellow tights arrived today and Drew wanted to be the first to wear them.

Yesterday my little sister and I went shopping. I was dying to look at nail polish...

I'm ever on the lookout for a gray nail polish that isn't too greenish or too purple...

PS: I certainly hope you have all beheld the majesties of "Friday" by Rebecca Black, one of the worst songs ever, which is... actually pretty catchy, if horribly written/conceived and autotuned beyond belief. I'm obsessed with this because it's become a meme in a week's time and I've watched it go from two million hits to seventeen million (as of now), take over Tumblr, and spawn macros and gifs like an unending fountain of hilarity. Monday, all I did was sit around with my friend K laughing at it. Now it's finally Friday and I can say: FRIDAY, FRIDAY, GETTIN' DOWN ON FRIDAY!

A song I might like even better is unfortuantely about Charlie Sheen, but it's by the geniuses behind the Double Rainbow Song and the Bed Intruder Song. You just can't deny these things.

There we go. Favorite things lately: Friday, Winning, nail polish, checking the mail obsessively for my Blythe clothes!

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still recovering from this weekend

How is it March? How is it March 9th? Where does the time go?

Over the weekend I got together with my best friend E (toting along Klara, Petaline, and Drew in my Epic Blythe Carry Bag) -- I hadn't seen her since Christmas, when I got to give her Simply Chocolate. I got to meet SC (named Cora) for real and see her in her cute red dress that E made! I love her complexion and think she is so sweet.

E and I watched a bunch of TV (the Doctor Who Christmas special, Supernatural, and Glee) and she knitted and I crocheted. Cora got a green hat with a pom-pom on top. I wound up taking home this little hat that E knitted up that didn't suit Cora. You know how you can tell when something fits your doll's personality or not! But I thought it was super-cute and pretty with Drew's burgundy-brown eyes.

I love it a lot! I don't tend to buy hats for my girls since I figure I can make them, but I can't knit, so really I should get some more knitted hats! I also just like that I might not normally choose yarn for myself in the colorway E used (I'm sadly, obsessively drawn to the same colors repeatedly) but I thought it was so cute knitted up. I am happy to have nicked it.

Seriously, I'm going to indulge in some Blythey retail therapy pretty soon.

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2/12...

I did manage to do A Doll A Day for two months -- ha!

Problems I ran into: sometimes just not being in the mood to fuss with it, or being too busy; not having daylight or places to take pictures; not being able to choose who to take a picture of sometimes! Yes, what a burden, to have too many choices! I also felt like doing it somehow cut into my time/creative energy. I don't know that for certain, but I felt like I crafted less, was in the mood to look at other people's Flickr streams less, was in the mood to blog less... that kind of thing!

One of the reasons I tag my shop with "a finger in every pie" is because I do have too many hobbies. I have been writing fiction lately and I didn't want ADAD to just become a chore I didn't think much about.

Nonetheless I really liked the spirit of participation and checking in on other people's ADAD shots, so I think ADAD is still pretty cool and wish everyone else who is doing it much luck!

Random outtakes:

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