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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like money

Ah, September, where have you gotten off to?? Side note: September is green to me. The number 7 is green, too.

Here's what I've been up to lately:

• yearning for autumn
• burning cinnamon-scented votive candles, in my yearning for autumn
• constructing lots of antlers
• writing
• Chore Wars
• planning a get-together with some long-time online friends in October! I hang out with L (a fellow Blyther!) about once a year, but I haven't met up with K in five years, and I've only met S in passing!
• listening to way too much Wonder Girls

Speaking, the Wonder Girls have a new song featuring Akon out, but "Be My Baby" is the one that I'm really playing the crap out of! Love it! It's hooky, melodic k-pop meets "Single Ladies." I'm so happy the Wonder Girls are trying to make it in America; I'm following them closely.


One more of my own little wonder girl... love this Reve de Rui dress! She's rocking Very Vicky's stock tights and her own stock boots (plus a bow from Forever 21).

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big blue eyes

I can't believe March is almost over already. I lost about 3/4 of it to allergies. I'm looking forward to April just because it won't be March!

Today the mail brought a pretty blue-green floral dress from princess51. I have another blue floral dress from her that I bought last year, and I love it! When I went to grab her URL just now I and I saw an apricot floral dress. Snatched!!

April is quite a blue month. When I saw this picture of Allison Harvard (internet sensation and two-time America's Next Top Model contestant) I thought, "It's April blue!" With my slight color synesthesia, I see Mondays, January, February, April, and August as various shades of blue.

Allison, who basically looks like a human Blythe doll, seems to have one, if I am to believe this picture. Is it just me, or is that an ADG Pleasant Peasant?

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do-it-your-own-dang-self ornaments

Today my little sister came over and we spent hours making kitschy, cheesy homemade Christmas ornaments for her tree! Our family's tree has always had an abundance of ornaments that you could consider kitschy or cheesy... stuff my mom bought in the early '80s at TG&Y for almost nothing, stuff we kids made in grade school, happy wooden figurines -- that's kind of what we like! She brought supplies, we went out for supplies (clothespins mainly, for making reindeer), and I have oodles of supplies already too.

I think about fourteen were made in total. My mom joined us, bringing in another three tons of supplies, and said, "What's your theme??"

My sister: "Homemade."

My mom: "I just wondered if you had a theme."

My sister: "...Christmas."

Me: [busts up laughing]

Crocheted a stocking on the fly and added a strip of white felt to the top. That's the fun thing about crocheting; you can just make it up as you go a lot of the time. I don't really know how to do things "right." But the theme was cheesy and homemade, so... it was hard to go wrong!

I did a wreath, too, by just chaining and then doing a single crochet in the same chunky yarn I use to do forest-colored deer hats along a small strip of florist wire, so it could retain a casual circle shape. Then I sewed some beads on for baubles, hot-glued a bow on, and tied even more yarn on for a hanger.

Then I did a beaded snowflake with silver and clear/iridescent beads on pretty blue felt. I think of that as "Monday blue" because that's close to the color I see Mondays as. (I have slight synesthesia with days/months.)  The thing that took the longest because it wanted many coats of paint was this gingerbread boy done in Sculpy. He got little puffball buttons and I painted on the icing with a toothpick instead of a brush.

My mom did these three heart-shaped ornaments:

My little sister did this elf fellow, adding a head and arms to a clothespin with Sculpy. His name is Günther and we created an extensive backstory about his job at the North Pole. His hat is rather jolly.

She also did these three reindeer (Rudolph, Dancer, and Prancer, she said), so I asked her if she would do a pink one for me, and she did! We both thought it was so cute that we did two more, one for her and one more for me...

They have little white puffball tails!! They're so freakin' cute! I think I might keep one and give one away as a present...

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