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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cinnamon girl

Hello! Happy June! Happy pride!

I've been in survival mode the past few months. Sort of painedly sticking out a rough season of life. Makes it a challenge to know what to even say in a post here on good ol' Cure Touch.

Here's Olwenn. Man, Takara knew what they were doing, putting Sporty Spice Lover (err, Sporty Lover Finesse) in red. She looks so dang good in it. I love her orange eyes, too. I think the only ones I want to change are her green set...

(Shorts: fromtheORN. Blouse: dollykiss, but it's from a long time ago. Boots: Takara I Love Shoes Red set.)

Haha, the last thing I need is more doll shoes (I bought both Takara I Love Shoes sets last fall), but I just bought a buttload of 'em on Etsy. Look, my Licca-bodied girls have but two pairs of shoes! One pair for each of them! I've been meaning to buy Licca shoes for years and only just did it. I hope they fit. It's a bit of a gamble when people lump shoes/clothing for many types of dolls under one umbrella, because surely what fits Barbie will fit Blythe.

Of late, I've gotten heavily into needle felting. I got a Woolbuddy felting mat and can't be stopped. My main interest is making Blythe stuff, such as small bags, and headbands in the style of sugarduckfairy (who doesn't seem to sell Blythe headbands currently, but her shop is dinosaurparties). I'm literally copying her designs. I have three of her headbands and love them so much, and would like thirty of them. I hope I can send her pics eventually. Like, as a fan. I really think these headbands are what inspired me to get into needle felting.

So, my guilty pleasure has become looking at wool roving packs on Etsy and picking out the perfect cinnamon colors, et cetera. Here's a pack that would match Olwenn today. All images sampled from oneoftheflock!

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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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