"Froggy, you weren't such a bad guy, either."

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The other day I was possessed by the urge to crochet a froggy headband for my girls. This is not an original design or concept, really! Just my take on it! There are lots of cute frog-inspired helmets and stuff for Blythe out there.

I'm kinda tickled with the way it turned out! I used a yellow-green yarn (it looks greener IRL than in these particular pics, but it's definitely not lime green), plus some white and chunky black, all of which I already had on-hand, and had myself a nice little time figuring out how I wanted to do the eyes.

I considered using elastic along the back to make it particularly accommodating, but I've done this on other headbands and it's some extra labor, and if you don't get the dimensions of the elastic exactly right, then the headband can be too large or too small, and either slouch or be so tight it slides up and off the doll's head. I did a couple of ties made up of single crochet, and quite simply tying them around the doll's chin before moving them behind her hair works so great!

I also added these heart beads on to the end of the ties, just for a cute touch! (I should probably trim these long draggly bits, huh.)

Honestly, making this gave me so much serotonin. I've been pretty bummed the last couple of months, and this did me soooo much good. I love spending time with my girls, and dressing Mallow in this green drawstring dress I've had in my dolly wardrobe since 2010 inspired me even further, so I made something else too! Stay tuned!

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springtime sittin'

Monday, March 25, 2024

STOP. This picture of Vesper!!! I'm in love. Vesper is very regal in style and this is the first dressup I've done with her where I thought it remotely began to approach suiting her elevated style. She's wearing Vinter Arden's dress and Dear Lele Girl's flower hair pin, and her own stock shoes. The hat looks like Very Vicky's, but in fact, it's one from the craft store that I doctored up with a lace bow!

But let's talk about this bench! Right now in their spring decor section, Michael's has these two miniature benches that are perfectly sized for Blythe!! They're supposed to be tabletop decor, I think. (They have a lot of miniature bathtubs right now too? For putting flowers or crystals in, or something.)

They are extremely cute, needless to say! It's actually rare I see stuff like this out in the wild. By "stuff like this" I mean miniature furniture that is the correct scale for Blythe. These aren't being sold in the miniatures section and aren't meant for dolls, I guess, but I think they're just about 1/6 scale by coincidence.

I not only took Vesper outside for a pic, but Wisp (I couldn't resist the green+brown color combination they've both got happening). It was quite chilly out despite the green spring grass, and windy to boot. Lots of stray hairs flying this way and that, and I quickly gave up before getting too many pics. But I'm pretty dang pleased with the cuteness this bench provided.

In personal news, I'm a month in on a dosage increase on one of my meds. I was on this dosage for a while and went back down a dosage again, but now I'm back up here, MG-wise. It's been messing with my sleep and my creativity. But your girl's out here tryin' her best.

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family portrait 2024

Thursday, February 22, 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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