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.)

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haul out the haul-y

Ah, how I do hate to make another "look what I got!" post, but hey. It's that time of year, baby. And I seem to be closing out 2025 with a tummy bug, juuuudging by the amount of times I've vomited the last couple of days. Sorry for the TMI. But the concept of making this post cheered me up! And I always think appreciating the gifts you've been given and one's own savvy shopping is fun. So don't consider this so much a "what I got for Christmas"/haul post as a post I am making to enshrine and appreciate!

For myself, using gift cards/my own money, I have bought a) this cream-colored quilted jacket; b) this gingham backpack; and c) this rust-orange velvet weekender bag.

I have a rust orange jacket (it's my favorite color) but my mom and I are taking nightly neighborhood walks and try if we can to wear light-colored things so we can be seen by drivers. Our neighborhood is very busy. We use our phone flashlights to try and light us up but I just felt the need to get a white sweater or jacket so people can see me easier. This one looks really cute.

The backpack I got because I just need something other than the tote bag I've been using to pack up my music-making stuff (mini amp, wireless dongles, chord notebooks) whenever I bring it anywhere, and I liked this one!

And the weekender tote, well, I don't strictly need it for anything. But I was gifted the matching cosmetic pouch set from my little sister for Christmas! She said the color reminded her of me -- which of course is spot-on. And I really love the baggies. I haven't shopped at Target in a couple of years due to the boycott but I had a Target gift card from last Christmas and got another one this Christmas, so I said what the heck and got the matching weekender bag when I saw it. Matchy-matchy!!! Depending on the size of the weekender bag (I bought it online so I don't 100% know) I can use it as a camera/tech bag or a crochet project bag for knitting club.

Sisters really made the stockings GOOD this year!

One sister got me a crazy blind box and a coloring book (which is so cozy! Colored several pages in it already!) and the other got me this bag set and a couple of figurines relevant to my interests! As you know, I have a number of Stitch figures, many of them from this sister. She found a real cute one this year. But this series looks to be harder to collect. Seems to be from the D23 Expo? I have found a few on eBay but couldn't find a picture of this figure anywhere! So I did take it from an eBay listing, lol.

There's the guy that was in the blind box. Love his lace overalls!

In my family, Nephew aside, we mostly just do stockings now, instead of bigger wrapped gifts. But I still really got some good stuff, as you can see! I also wanted to feature this little thing that was in my stocking at my grandmother's:

It's a little strawberry stationery set?? Full of little mini supplies! A tiny stapler and staple remover, a hole punch, some small tape, scissors, binder clips. Soooo freaking cute and useful! Love it!

On the strawberry tip, I also just now acquired a few things I've been looking for since October!

Five Below has these fashion sets inspired by the '80s Strawberry Shortcake. When I saw them in August I thought, "That looks like it might fit Blythe!" So I got the cutest set of the three available then and tried it out on Aury and Fey.

Not every item fits and not every item is, like, one I want. BUT, for $4 a set, that's such a great price for some little t-shirts and dresses! I freaking love the sunflower dress and the cute Orange Blossom tee. IMO the shoes and bags and hats are better for, like, scene-setting props. So I went back and got the other two sets, which were Blueberry Muffin and Lemon Merengue.

Since then I've been on the lookout for the other sets, which I saw online circa October. But my local Five Below didn't get them until, like, RIGHT NOW! I checked a few times and they were never on the shelves... UNTIL TODAY! YAY!

I'm really excited to have completed the collection and excited to open these up when I'm feeling a little better and see which pieces are the best. Been meaning to do a post all about these sets, and hopefully I will also do that in 2026. I have never been super into getting, say, Skipper or Barbie or Bratz or random other doll items for my Blythes. I prefer the bespoke handmade stuff, I guess. But these sets are an exception. Cheap items, yes, but also really colorful and fun.

The holidays this year were really busy. Craft market; band; lots of singing with family and friends and dinking around on my Omnichord; nightly walks; family coming into town. It is definitely a bummer to end it feeling run-down with this bug, whatever it is. But I enjoyed making this post, even if it is very consumerist.

See y'all in 2026!!!

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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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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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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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Heart of the ocean...?

I'm all bizarrely into this one shade of blue-green lately... it's hard to name in particular, word-wise. (Is it... dark... teal...?) Also Pantone-wise, I can't officially place it, because monitors all look different. I can't really link that with confidence that it's the color my eye really wants to see... but you get it the gist, right? It's a shade of blue tinged with green, but not so much you'd see it and think, "That's green!"

And it's hard to find out in the world, in terms of clothes or -- as pictured -- nail polish. It's really easy for the color to be a touch too green and wind up looking like some cheap dark green vinyl restaurant tabletop, as that Nuance polish is. (I'll still use it -- dark nail polish suits me best.) I think I'm going to try mixing in that blue Orly shade (I've had it for years and it's one of my favorites!!), but the Wet n Wild one, I thought maybe ombre nails or something...!

The other week I scoured the fabric racks at the craft store for a shade that was right, but they were all too green or just plain ol' blue. So I went to the embroidery floss. I picked out some, but then just got carried away and picked out more and more because I got inspired to do some embroidery! Hopefully that'll be my next project. This kind of color doesn't go in my room at all, but I gotta follow my bliss.

Don't mind Fey. She's part of the blue-green obsession currently. Another thing I can't get enough of right now is this OGX argan oil conditioner. (Oh, excuse me, "hair butter.") I use the other deep conditioner, too, because my poor bleached hair really needs the extra help now and again. Leave-in conditioner is a completely new experience for me...

Basically, these pictures are representing the mental color shrine I'm slowly building. Maybe I'll even clear off one of my shelves and create a tableau. I've done it before.

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video: Get Beatrix and Fey Ready With Me!

Greetings, loved ones. (I really like saying that, because... Snoop Dogg.)

I finally got to work on a video, so here it is, if you like those. I kinda piled on the dolls in this video. I had to show off Aury!!


(I made that last shot into a Christmas card. Now I have to email it to my mom.)

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hiveminded

I'd like to pretend I just thought of dressing up a bunch of my girls like bees while I was decluttering my dresses, but that would be a lie. I have wanted to do it for, like, a year. I have a bunch of yellow dresses and enough stripes to go around. It was getting some free socks from CoolCat (the gray and white striped ones Mallow is rocking) that finally pushed me to make antennae out of gold sparkly pom-poms and black pipe cleaners. It was fun!

It's absolutely summer now, though. It's so humid where I live!! So gross and unpleasant. Getting outside, even as early as possible (it was about 8:30am when I took these pictures), was like slogging through a swamp.

Worth it! I do look like an insane person, though, with half my dolls dressed as bees (Soleil and Lamb not pictured... I can only haul so many dolls) and the other half naked.

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We found Wonderland.

On our "beach day" during my trip to California, we stopped to pick up my cousin, who lives in an apartment complex where the entire front wall is lined with figurines and miscellaneous stuff I can't begin to explain, let alone really capture. One of the tenants has been putting this stuff up for years and it's very colorful, cluttered, and crowded. I was reaching for my camera and plucking Fey up for a photoshoot immediately. What a freaking sight it was! I was full on Precious Moments Chapel giggling.

My aunt followed with her Love Me Linda and we took pictures in one of the sections that appeared to comprise entirely of a garden gnome collective.

The look on Fey's sweet face!

You can't even tell this is just the front of an old apartment building. It looks like an enchanted forest.

Further down the line, there were groupings of owls, some rabbits (?? I think?), penguins... I took pics of Linda and Fey in front of this cheesy but color-compulsory sign. Beyond the penguins, I can't even remember what else there was. Somewhere along the way there was a section of ceramic teddy bears that sorta began to creep me out, because it seemed more like a child had abandoned them there than the more nature-esque animal figures.

I have to say, it was fun taking pictures of a different doll... my aunt kept saying I didn't have to concern myself with Linda, but I took a bunch for her because she won me over. Her face is winsome. And I love cheesy stuff like this. California lady who created this wall of kitsch, you have my gleeful admiration!

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California adventure, part one.

Last week I took a trip to California to visit some relatives. I mostly went to escort my grandmother, who is 82 and doesn't like to travel on her own, but I had never been out there, so!

After some hemming and hawing, I brought Fey with me. One of the reasons I did is because I know my aunt had a few big-eyed dolls and I thought she would "get" my Blythe. I for some reason thought she had a Susie Sad Eyes, so I bought a dress from sleepforever after asking if they would fit Susie Sad Eyes. What a dummy I felt like when I got there and my aunt actually had a Love Me Linda collection! Way bigger than Blythe.

Still, my aunt had... I'm not sure how many Love Me Lindas. Somewhere from eight to ten! She keeps them packed away because they creep out my uncle, but we got out her childhood Linda to stand with Fey in the room I was staying in. Look at that dress!

I won't post boring family pictures and stuff; it was a chill vacation with a lot of sitting around visiting and eating.

A huge amount of the time I was there we spent singing -- mostly karaoke, because my relatives have their own machine and about 1800 songs. We karaoked two days in a row. We sang a ton so I've forgotten everything I did, but I recall singing "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift, "Chantilly Lace" by the Big Bopper, "Every Morning" by Sugar Ray, "No Rain" by Blind Melon, "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette, "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf, "The Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin, and two Meat Loaf jams: "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" and "Paradise By the Dashboard Light."

Almost everyone knows the latter song, but it's a duet... and it has that whole middle section where there's the baseball announcer... and no one knew it well enough to sing it duet-style with me, so I did all the parts in a massive tour de force. It's also at least eight minutes long, so after that, I was pretty winded!

However, my aunt also has a guitar, so she let me play it while I was there. My grandma and I sang simple folk songs together, and that's always fun.

On day two we met up with my cousin and went out to the beach. Fey came along because I wanted to take some pictures of her. Fey was such a trooper, sitting in my camera bag for hours!

I had to find a shady spot, since all but two of my girls are shiny-faced, and also, we went to a pretty crowded beach. So much respect for people who take the time to really pose their girls in the sand...!

I have more doll pictures to share. Later this week!

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blue skies, gray eyes

It's actually nice out today! It's been below freezing here for several weeks and sunlight has been nearly unheard of, but it's sunny out right now. I still needed a sweater, but Fey was okay with her arms bare.

I like this outfit on her -- the tights are this teal-y blue and her dress is black with white polka-dots, but she's wearing one of those little Mini Jijo tutu skirts underneath it and it's navy! You can hardly see it in pictures, but in real life it's a cute tone-on-tone effect.

A couple of months ago I was doing some eyechip replacing and changed out Fey's stock green chips for these gray ones. She has those lovely wheat-colored front-facing ones, so I'm happy she has a neutral side-eye now too!

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"shucks!"

Fey is the first to wear these rêve de Rui* overalls I acquired a while ago. With her Licca body, she can put her hands in the pockets and look casual! So cute!

Man... six out of eleven of my girls are in rêve de Rui* duds right now...

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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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glances back through May

Fey and Clarke.

Rilakkuma USB drives?? Don't mind if I do!

"Ah, a lovely cheese pizza just for me."

Really cool and super unexpected b-day gift came to me from my bestie a week after said b-day... a mini fridge!! Did I buy cute magnets for it?

Yes. Yes, I did. These are from As I Breathe I Hope. Super cute wrapping, right??

A thank you card was sent post-haste.

Believe you me, I experienced some mundane/terrible things in May, too, so it wasn't all roses. But isn't it nicer to just focus on the roses?

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