A new fun feature on BlytheLife.com is something I’d like to call Freebie Friday Five. It may not be a weekly occurrence (and may also not always happen on a Friday…), but from time to time I will showcase 5 fantastic and free things related to Blythe that I’d like to share with you! If you have any suggestions at all for what I should do a little showcase on and share with everyone on BlytheLife.com, please email me!

1. With the crackdown on people breaking the Terms of Service on Flickr, people in the doll community are looking for new places to host photos for things like sales and auctions. There’s a lot of free sites available out there that you can host your pics there, free of charge. My favourite is Photobucket (but I’ve blogged about this here before!).
2. Check out daily postings of 365 dolls over on Flickr! Due to the nature of the challenge (taking daily photos), there’s always something new going on in the 365 group! So be sure to check out some photos and maybe hit fave or comment on some if you like them.
3. Read a blog or two! Some fun Blythe-related ones that I love and think you should read too are Blythe Blog (written by April), Mademoiselle Blythe (written by Fanny) and We Play With Dolls (written by several bloggers in Australia). They are all fantastic inspirations with cute blogs to boot!
4. Impromptu fashion show with your dolls and their clothes! Has it been a while since someone’s gotten a change of clothes? Maybe it’s been a long time since you had taken their photo? Today’s the day to change all of that! Giving a doll a little bit of attention helps revive your love for her, plus it’s probably nice to give a girl a change of clothes from an outfit they’d been wearing for a month (or longer!).
5. Do a meme! Tag someone, fill out a little survey, do something fun today that’s prompted by someone else. To get you started, there’s a great website called The Daily Meme.

There’s a little website out there called Blythe Got Swag. It’s a brand new (just started in June) and it’s all dedicated to the fun fashions of our favourite doll: Blythe.

Ran by Maya (also known as kittenvomit on Flickr), the site’s premise is to showcase the outfit that dolls are wearing right now. You can make submissions of your own photos and include information about who designed the clothes that your little fashionista is wearing as well as include links to the shops and to your own sites.

Blythe Got Swag reminds me a lot of those fashion websites dedicated to clothes for people where they showcase their own outfits for the day and mention where they got things and who designed them. It’s pretty neat to see a Blythe equivalent out there! So go ahead and send in a submission of your doll in your favourite (or perhaps funniest) outfit! Be sure to include where you got the cute clothes!

I brought my dolls to work quite frequently to work last summer (being a full-time student from September to April leads to only working full time in the summer term) and my coworkers were, for the most part, quite nice about the fact that I was bringing in dolls to work. It probably helps that I look really young and they teased me about it in a joking way. The only incident I had about it last year was with a pair of coworkers lifting up the dress of a doll to see what she was wearing underneath!

This summer, this have changed a bit. There’s a new coworker who took it upon himself to be quite mean about the fact that I had a doll at work or that I even collect dolls (I should have known better – he was quite rude about the desktop image that I had too and didn’t hesitate to tell people that “Michelle has a dolly on her desktop!”). But new/rude coworker aside, everyone else was fairly nice about me having a Blythe on my desk. They didn’t make repeated comments and most people were curious about the pullstrings and “Does your doll talk?” was a very common question.

Do you bring your Blythes or other dolls/toys to work? What kind of response do you get from your coworkers about it?

It happened to me while I was in Portland. Random passersby would come up and go “What’s so special about these dolls?”. People are naturally curious about things like that, especially since it was a large group of people all with these strange dolls in their hands with the big heads and big eyes and small bodies. I’ve also explained what Blythe is all about to coworkers before.

I always start at the beginning. That Blythe was mass produced for just one year (1972) and that they stopped making her because kids didn’t like her. Something about the eyes, probably, and the pull string. (It does happen to creep out other people too.)

I try explaining what makes them so special now. About the dolly community, how creative people can be, how people customize their dolls. This almost always seems to lead the conversation to “What do you mean people ‘customize’ them? I though they were expensive/hard to find/imported only!”. The uninitiated seem to think about the monetary value a lot of the time. Maybe because they ask me how much a Blythe costs and I generally tell them – people tend to hand the dolls back straight away, or decline on wanting to hold her (kind of like me and when I first met a Parco).

Going over the basics tends to help – don’t overload newbies with too much information. I tell them a little about the history, that they’re now made by a company called Takara in Japan (but manufactured in China). They have four eye colours, two face forward and then the other two face to either side. The dolls are about the same height as Barbie, but have similar body size/shape to Skipper (I only mention this when people go “Why don’t you just get a Barbie instead?”). Please don’t tug on both pullstrings at the same time (if the doll in question happens to have sleepy eyes).

Most people are politely interested. Most people are curious, only because they’ve never seen a Blythe before and want to know why she has such a huge head (all the better to hold an eye mechanism, my dear!).

What do you tell people when you’re explaining Blythe?

Budgeting can be a very personal thing. We’re taught early on that it’s rude to ask people about money or wages and to only discuss such things amongst close family members. With Blythe, it’s kind of an open secret. Secret only to those not familiar with the costs of pocketed dresses, embroidered hats and that special custom doll by a certain designer. After all, we know how much a Goldie usually goes for, especially with uncut stock hair. We know that a NRFB Kenner goes for well over a thousand dollars. There’s no hiding how much we spend on dolls. If you’d just bought a Princess a la Mode, you’re not going to fool anyone in the dolly community into thinking that you got for her a low hundred dollars (even if you can get your non-Blythe friends and family to believe you!).

When I don’t get a new doll, my spending for this dolly hobby of mine is typically $25 (Canadian) or less. During the school year, the most spending I do is usually just for fabrics and trims at the crafts store because even though I spend a lot of time looking at dolls and sundries – I hardly ever buy anything (sad, but true). I go through long dry spells of no dolly mail and then I’ll do a little bit of spending get a lot of mail and that’ll tide me over for a few months again.

Heather (of Claribari Blythe) asked on last week’s Blythe On A Budget:

If it isn’t too personal, I would be curious how much the typical Blyther spends in a month (the ones where they don’t buy a Kenner…that would blow the budget!)

So… What’s your typical dolly budget look like when you’re not making extravagant purchases? Unless, of course, you do buy a Kenner every month, in which case that’s part of your regular budgeting!