strawberry springtime

Got a yen to do another little setup with some miniatures. Recently I dressed Fidelia and Beatrix in some duds from the Strawberry Shortcake fashion sets I blogged about here (and which I scored from Five Below). I really, really love this plaid dress with the double ribbons at its drop waist! I'm not sure that it's a drop waist on the doll for which it is meant, but on Beatrix, it sure is.

(Other outfit roundup deets: Fidelia's skirt is from PrettyBomb and she's wearing Didee Eureka's stock Mary Janes. Beatrix's sneakers are from thehandflower.)

Another Strawberry Shortcake thing I got from Five Below recently is this Teeny Tinies! Strawberry's Bake Shop Set. It was $5, of course, and came with 20 pieces, some of which I like and some of which I don't. But that's a great price for a handful of miniatures I do like. I'm kinda miniatures-crazy right now so I actually got three sets of Teeny Tinies! miniatures... Anyway, I used several items from this specific set here!

Most from the Strawberry's Bake Shop Set -- the cart and everything on top of the cart -- but the doughnuts on the lower tray, the teacups, and the pink lemonade bottle are craft store miniatures.

I got out one of my Michael's not-doll-furniture benches from a couple of years ago, some 1:6-ish scale cushions I hand-sewed eons ago, and this little bunny! Because of course! Easter!

I was pretty tickled just setting all this up and taking photos. But I decided to take some footage with my phone, too, and edit together a small reel or short or whatever you want to call it. Here 'tis:

Notes on this little video:

• I don't know how to edit videos on my phone. I must admit my ignorance here. I have abandoned social media several times since 2016 (due to mental health/feeling unable to cope with the state of the world at large), don't use TikTok at all, etc. I'm not a short form content girlie. So I kind of missed the boat on editing together content for platforms that have made strong moves towards it. Like, I do not know what app people are using to make their videos?!!?! iMovie? Capcut? What is the proper workflow for that? I only know how to use Adobe Premiere on my desktop computer. So I used that to edit this, uploaded it to the cloud, and used the Reels app on my phone just to put a slight lighting filter over the finished product, to try and get the virulent colors to be more true to life.
• Yes, the background music is me playing my Omnichord!!! Because I am really interested in using it for stuff like this. I just placed it on my desk where my keyboard is and aimed a mic at its speaker! So, you can hear not only the output, but you can actually hear me pressing the buttons. It sounds to me like a music box with that kind of clicking. And I am just playing through the first verse of "In the Golden Afternoon" from Disney's Alice in Wonderland on it. I'm really tickled this worked alright.

I'm spending so much of my time on band stuff -- pretty much since I joined it, last summer, my time's really been sucked away by it -- but lately I'm feeling a lot of desire to try and pack my own individual hobbies back onto my plate. I want to do doll stuff, I want to sew more little cushions and pillows for my doll furniture, I want to sew some little clothes!

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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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leaning into it

The other day I mentioned indulging hyperfixations as a means of staying afloat in Times Like These. Not that I think one needs a reason (especially not a dire reason) to indulge a hyperfixation. It just, I have to say, has been such a lifesaver for me of late, and I am embracing it.

Litten, the Pokemon, is a weird accidental hyperfixation I developed last year. Like, this was not a choice I made, hahah. I don't know how better to state this, but my brain feels... sparkly when I see Litten? Like I can literally feel neurotransmitters shooting around in my skull. Sometimes I tingle. Sometimes I want to cry... out of love. Again, I need to express: I didn't randomly decide, "Oh, I think I'll get really into this random Pokemon all of a sudden. This will be my new obsession." I have no idea why this was my brain's response to this Pokemon. It isn't even the cutest Pokemon, imo. And I have enjoyed Pokemon in general, as a franchise, for many years without ever experiencing this type of big emotional response, either to the franchise as a whole or to a singular specific 'mon. This from a person who has a Top 5 Favorite Pokemon list. Even from my perspective it is bizarre to feel this strongly about a Pokemon.

I get a lot of really good brain tinglies and happiness from it, so I'm personally not mad at it. But I do recognize that it is confounding from the outside. I also find it inexplicable, and understand if it seems bizarre or irritating.

Anyway, for my birthday last year, my bestie basically gifted me a whole-ass Litten collection! I posted about it here (and I am going to post even more about it soon)! She gifted me several plush Littens and three tiny figurines. As I noted in that post, I thought it'd be fun to collect more of the figurines.

The figurines need their own post, and believe you me I am looking forward to that post SO MUCH! It's in the chamber!

However, in the meantime: the Litten figurine pictured here with Trainer Fidelia surprised me when I received it in the mail the other day. It's a McDonald's toy and three times the size of my other tiny figurines! I couldn't tell from the eBay listing that it would be so much larger. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the figures in my modest yet thrilling-to-me collection... literally. I doubt it will fit in the display I'm planning.

But I thought, while it's too big for my display, it is actually quite properly sized for a Blythe!!

"Litten! Use Ember!"

Litten used Ember! It's super effective!

It came with a plastic bit of "fire" (since Litten, a fire type, can breathe fire as one of its moves) that clicks into its gaping rectangular maw.

Fidelia and Litten have matching hair! Fur! Whatever! Litten's red-orange face and markings can sometimes lean more red or more orange, depending on the particular plush or particular screengrab. But I thought pairing Fidelia and Litten would be perfect! Sometimes trainers really match their Pokemon!

For Fidelia's trainer lewk, I was inspired by the character of Misty and the way her ponytail sticks up, but also by a sort of athletic look. I used Wendy Weekender's star-studded ponytail holder on one of Deely's pigtails. (I wish I'd adjusted them so they could be seen more clearly here.) I wanted her hair to kind of stick out in a Misty-ish fashion!

She's wearing cropped black leggings I got second-hand on one of the forums, either Blythe Kingdom or Plastic Paradise, back in the absolute day of 2010. She's also wearing a ringer tee with black and white striped sleeves, but you can't really see it because she's got on Sporty Lover Finesse's windbreaker. She's also wearing SLF's sneakers -- which are good, but I hardly ever use them. With the white top and black pants, it's an outfit very resminiscent of SLF's stock. That was accidental!! The windbreaker was a last-minute addition. But really, said windbreaker looks cute with Fidelia's hair, imo.

If I could change anything about this outfit to make it look more trainer-esque, I'd sew red patches onto the knees of the leggings. I think red sneakers would also be really good.

I think another cute trainer-ish outfit would be a pair of overalls and Simply Mango's stock stripey tee. It'd be so fun to do a whole post of trainer-inspired outfits. I'm also currently wondering if they make 1/12 size Poke Balls...

(They do. I will buy some next month, haha.)

Final note on these pictures: Between you and me, I photoshopped Litten's mouth in the first picture so it wouldn't be an empty square, but one of his typical mouth shapes. Not a big smiler, is Litten.

Okay, so, this delighted me beyond all good sense. I have more to share about my figurine collecting, and will do so soon.

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drawstring dress

Waah! I sewed a dress!!

Okay, so it kinda barely counts as a dress. It's like a tube. But still!

The other day I dressed Mallow in one of the two drawstring dresses I've had in my Blythe wardrobe since back in the day. I think I got them second-hand on Blythe Kingdom; I don't know who originally made them. Basically, they're like little drawstring bags, but open at the far end. They cinch with ribbon strung through a channel that goes around the doll's neck, and then you can tie it at one side.

It's been a while since I've thought about these two dresses. But once I fished the green one out to put on Mallow, I realized, "This is just two pieces of fabric... I wonder if I can sew something like this."

I turned the other drawstring dress I have, which is white with squirrels on it, inside-out and gave it a look. First I traced around it onto some graph paper and tentatively extrapolated the places where the fabric was folded around the top. Then I studied the order of operations in how it had been sewn, folding it at the proper places. (And I have to say, for me, this was genuinely akin to messing with high-level black magicks, so I'm surprised my dark guess-trapolations were remotely workable. Honestly. My brain is not good at this kind of stuff.)

So, long story short, I tested it out and hand-sewed a frickin' DRESS! Out of this cute mushroom fabric, because of course, cute mushroom fabric, what do you take me for! I had some gingham ribbon on hand and thought it matched the vibe well enough to act for the closure. It came together pretty perfectly--in a technical sense, as in, everything works as it should! Of course my hand-stitching looks sort of homespun, especially because I used a highly contrasting thread. (Look... if I am sewing by hand, I have to be able to see my stitches on the fabric!!) And it took a couple of hours of sewing since I wasn't using a machine. But Fidielia is literally wearing it right now, so I do not care one whit if it looks cheesy!

Even having taken a couple of hours, this came together a lot faster than the skirts I've recently sewed, so you can bet I'm going to go through a phase of making drawstring dresses! Look forward to more...

I think they would look cute with some embellishments, like little pockets or embroidery or appliques. But there's something to be said for simplicity too. Simple shape, simple execution.

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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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sewing Blythe tights

Having mastered the sock creation process, I set out next to make Blythe tights.

O, hubris.

I bought this pattern, but since I am a sewing ignoramus, I was halted in my tracks here. I think this particular pattern is for people with more sewing experience (or general spatial skills) than I have. Ones who can just see pattern pieces and know how they go together, either because they've done a lot of sewing or they can bend things in their mind in a way I can't. If there are written instructions for actually sewing the pieces together somewhere in the pattern pdf, I missed them. But truthfully I have a hard time understanding written instructions anyway. Recipes, maps, directions, rights versus lefts, cardinal directions... all bewilder me. So I don't really know that even a very detailed pattern could have helped me.

I sat for several hours trying to figure these out on my own. I thought surely I could... I had made socks, hadn't I?? I tried to hold the fabric pieces to each other in different configurations. I just really couldn't see how to pin the pieces so they'd become tights.

Finally I went to YouTube and found this tutorial, which was instrumental in guiding me through the process, and... victory!!!

Uhh... I mean, they're a little too long.

But listen! I have many pairs of Blythe tights that don't fit perfectly! I have an ancient sheer green pair acquired secondhand I quite like that are very ill-fitting -- way, way too long. So I was only stoked. For a first attempt, these look pretty good. If you don't lift up Fidelia's skirt, you'd never know. (These particular pics are phone pics taken in my always-dark bedroom, so the colors are a little off. They're actually rusty orangey-brown, as pictured in the other pics in this post.)

It took making a few not-so-great pairs for me to actually figure out how to get the tights to really fit, both length-wise and waistband-wise. To acquire the right dolly-sized elastic and discover the best practices for ease and efficiency in sewing them up.

Construction-wise, I looked closely at Simply Bubble Boom's pink stock tights to see if I could do anything differently. In my opinion, aside from being made by machine and some aesthetic differences in the waistband (the manufacturers for the official stock used even smaller elastic and let it be totally visible on the inside of the waistband, whereas I hide the elastic within the waistband), they look pretty identical.

I'm not good enough with a machine to be using it to make these. So all the tights and socks I've made are hand-sewn, and thus don't have robotically even stitches, and such. But I'm proud this is something I have managed to tackle.

Thank goodness for YouTube and for people who work to make tutorials of all types that others can access for free. I never would have figured out how to put these together on my own.

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video: Get Fidelia Ready With Me!

This week I filmed a couple of dolly videos, and here's one of them. Dolly Dressups are my fave and I really like the ensemble Fidelia ended up in. (She's really tricky to dress to my satisfaction!)


In other news, I'm ready for Lent to be over!! I've been failing more and more at keeping from Laptop Lounging (which, again, means essentially doing nothing; if I'm actually doing something -- even if that something is catching up on Pretty Little Liars and throwing a fit because NO TO ALL THESE DUMB OLD COUPLES -- then laptop usage is fine).
Easter looks like it's gonna be a bummer this year. Usually we hunt eggs, even though the youngest of us is 17 or so, but it looks like that's not in the cards. For a long time now it's been the only reason I don't hate the holiday as much as I hate Thanksgiving. It's not that I particularly love to hunt eggs -- there have been years where I've hidden them rather than hunted -- but I enjoyed it as a way to spend time with my sisters and cousins. I'm sad when things like this, traditions, change.

I came back and added this picture to this post! It shows Fidelia's brown chips that I mentioned in the video... and it's about as Eastery as it's gonna get this year!

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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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Merry Christmas Eve! (Also, a video!)

First, here's a shot of Lamb under our tree!

Okay, so you guys would simply not believe the amount of Christmas cookies made in our house the past couple of weeks. I didn't get pictures of them all, but this is only about a third. I helped pipe on these as well as the chocolate horses/teddy bears below, but mostly, these were made by my sisters for parties and friends and such.

(Oh, my little sister made these candy sleighs for her boyfriend's family's kids!)

And one last shot of Fidelia with Jack Skellington. I'm listening to The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack right now!



Finally, a video... a vlog, I guess. This was a request. Took forever and ever, as usual. I keep thinking I've got this whole process mastered, but nope. :)

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Christmas trees / room tour...

Remember my pink mini tree? It's back! I acquired another mini tree this year, this one even more mini! It's white and it was, like, $5, so. It's joined my pink tree on my sewing table.

Hey, some people on YouTube requested a room tour, so... I filmed that this week. I remember a commenter here asking me if I'd do a room tour once, too. Here it is, if you're interested.


As always, mixed feelings about this kind of thing... I don't feel happy with it (skipped over some stuff, didn't have enough lighting, hate the sound of my own voice, et cetera), but I guess I just did the best I could with what equipment I've got and I'm glad I edited the footage down from an hour to 34 minutes.

Anyway, something that wasn't in my video is that my pink tree has a string of LED lights with snowflakes on them, and they give off a blue-toned white glow. I prefer warm-toned lights so it kind of clashes with my room, but it makes this picture of my Simply Bubble Boom, named Fidelia, and my Jack Skellington Funko Pop figurine look like a scene from the iconic "What's This?" scene! 

What's this? What's this? These trees are awfully small! What's this? There's green on every wall! What's this? The teeth are smiling, what's with that, how creepy! Endless felt and rows of dolls! What's this??

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