Lets say that there’s some kind of disaster (and it’ll be a financial one because I’m not going to put you through a hypothetical house fire or flooding). You have to sell off most of your Blythes and you can only afford to keep one of the ones that you already own. So it can’t be that you choose to only have Princess a la Mode when you’ve never touched the doll before!

Now, you keep as much (or as little) of the doll clothes that you already have. You just need to pick one Blythe doll. It doesn’t matter if she’s your most expensive or your least expensive – just the one that you would want to keep the most.

I think for me, the Blythe that I would want to keep the most is my redheaded Kenner, Emmalynn. I’ve been doing all of the restorations myself and she’s also the most expensive Blythe that I own. Not only that, but all of my Neo Blythes are stock (or mostly stock, aside from chip changes or gaze lifting), so while it wouldn’t necessarily be the same doll, I could eventually rebuy the ‘same doll’… one day. I would hope that whoever I were to sell some of my Neo favourites would be willing to reselling them back to me when I’m financially able to rebuy them though.

If you could only keep one of the Blythes that you already own, who would you pick and why?

Shopping Saturday is a feature on BlytheLife.com to help you either shop or promote your shop’s sales. If you want to have your sale included in Shopping Saturday, submissions must be made by 12pm Pacific on the Friday before and all coupon codes must be valid for the entire weekend that they are featured.

For more information, you can check out the Shopping Saturday page or send questions to michelle@blythelife.com.

• The Helmet Factory has a 20% coupon code until the end of Sunday January 29 2012: BLROCKS

Every month’s last Friday (or just once a month, sometime on a Friday) is part of a feature on BlytheLife.com, Freebie Friday Five. Welcome everyone to this month’s instalment! I mention 5 things I love every month that’s free to do/read/see.

If you have any suggestions for next month’s Freebie Friday Five, please don’t hesitate to email me! Maybe you have a site you think that I should feature or a pattern that’s free and up on the web? Tell me!

For the month of January, I picked out some of the sites that I kept going back to during the month. I hope you like them too!

1. Blythopia.com is a fantastic resource website. You can look up any of the NEO Blythes to see release dates, names, types of stock. There’s also information about the dress sets and shoe sets! It’s run by Jennatomic, who took over Blythopia and revamped the site.
2. There’s the Dolly Dress Challenge group over on Flickr. I love seeing photos of what people have made! There’s a few different challenges that have happened in the group. One was to make a clothing item per day, the new one is to make one item for each doll.
3. I’ve been wanting to make a doll house (or just several room boxes) for ages now, but I just don’t have the room. This doesn’t stop me from thinking about how I would like to decorate the rooms though! You can find fantastic free printable scrapbook paper on sites like ScrapbookScrapbook.com and MrPrintables.com, all you need is to supply the printer, paper and the ink.
4. More printable minis! I found TreeFeathers.com and their site has things like vintage Valentines, movie posters and some super-cute vintage travel posters. All printable pages have a little 1″ ruler at the bottom.
5. And another Flickr group that I want to draw attention to is Kenner 365, or also known as A Kenner A Day. I love looking at all the great photos of the vintage girls. There’s also weekly themes, which is fantastic if you’re stuck and unsure of how to take photos of your 1972 Blythes!

If you know of a site, group or activity that you think I should highlight in next month’s Freebie Friday Five, let me know! Comment below or email me.

What is the best way to find money in the budget for Blythe? Save money in other sections! This is me assuming that you can pay for everything else in life (rent, utilities, food and other necessities) and you don’t need to sock away the saved money into savings… Although if you put all the extra money that you don’t need to spend into a savings account, you could save it for a rainy day… or a Rainy Day Parade.

Blythe isn’t cheap. It’s really not. I wish it was a cheaper hobby, but it’s not. The dolls are money, the shoes, the glasses, the clothes, the fabric and yarn is all money. Money, money, money. So what can you do to save money to have more room in the budget for Blythe (or maybe savings?).  There’s couponing, for one. And shopping for things that you would have bought anyways while it’s on sale. There’s no need to go all Extreme Couponing (because, let’s face it, no one needs 50+ bottles of mustard in their personal grocery store in their basement), even a few savings here or there can all add up!

The important thing to remember about couponing when you want to save some money is that you’re not saving anything if you wouldn’t have purchased it anyways. Say you have a coupon and you could get a $1 jar of peanut butter – it’s still a wasted dollar if you and everyone that you know hates or is allergic to peanut butter. Take that into consideration when looking for coupons to supplement your weekly grocery trip.

And, as a note before you go of and start downloading coupons – please exercise caution when giving your address online (some sites will mail the coupons to you, while others are printables only).

For my Canadian readers, I know of a few couponing websites, blogs and forums:

• BargainMoose.ca – blog – sales or coupon codes for Canadian and American based shops
• Save.ca – coupons – free coupons that are mailed to your home
• SmartCanucks.ca – forum + coupons database – lots of great resources!
• RedFlagDeals.com – forum+ coupons database – lots of great resources, I tend to avoid the forums section because people are rude, but the content is still good.
• Websaver.ca – coupons – free coupons that are mailed to your home (minimum 3 ordered coupons at one time)

For my American readers, here’s a small selection of US couponing/deal-finding sites (there are a lot, so Google away if you want to find some more!):

• CouponCabin.com – offers of grocery coupons and coupons for clothing stores as well, many of them are printables.
• CouponMom.com – many grocery coupons and state-specific coupons, there’s even a section for restaurant coupons (for those who like to eat out).
• Coupons.com – customizable by your postal code, you can find printable a lot of printable coupons for groceries, house hold items and services in your area.
• RetailMeNot.com – it’s a fantastic website that I use from time to time (for cross-border online shopping), mostly showing coupon codes for a certain amount or percentage off, or coupon codes for free shipping (always important!).

For the Australian readers, I didn’t want to leave you out of the money-saving fun! I haven’t tried most of these (seeing as how I’m not located in Australia), but they seemed to be pretty straight-forward when it come to using them, so hopefully they’ll be of use to you.

• ShopADocket.com.au – the site offers coupons for restaurants, retail shops and services, all you need to do is type in your location or postal code to get coupons for your area.
• TopBargains.com.au – a little searching is involved, but there’s a whole section dedicated towards pizza coupons, yum! There’s also a freebies & samples section, which I think is totally awesome.

For people who aren’t from Canada, the USA or Australia… I ran into a bit of a roadblock when trying to find sites that didn’t seem scammish, sorry! If you have any additional websites that you would like to share with your fellow Blythe enthuiasts, please comment below with the URL of the site and what country/countries it caters towards.

Happy saving, everyone!

It’s generally frowned upon to discuss money in public. After all, finances are personal, right? But the cost of Blythe, regardless of how you may fudge the number, is still high. I’m not writing this to call anyone out. Some people have arrangements for monthly ‘fun’ money. Or they just take care of their own personal money after joint bills and necessities are paid for. Some people post publicly about lying to their spouse/partner about how much their doll hobby costs. The idea of this seems odd, unless you actually use money that you can afford to use for entertainment purposes. But if you can afford it, and you’re using the money, how do you justify the cost of it when you’re balancing the chequebook?

I see posts online from people in the doll hobby who will say that they lied about the total cost of a doll to their husband, even going so far as to only disclose half of the cost. That’s a lot of money to be lying about, especially for a hobby that’s not a necessity. It’s one thing to joke about how shh, don’t tell the spouse how much the new doll cost! But it’s entirely an other to actually lie about it. Full disclosure is the best policy.

But if you have no spouse/partner or anyone who depends on you to tell the truth about the money and you can afford it…

I live at home (I commute to school) and my parents know how much Blythe costs (in fact, they’re the reason why I have four out of nine!). My boyfriend (whom I do not live with) knows how much Blythe costs because he’s seen me looking at auction listings on his computer before. My top financial responsibility is my tuition. But fun money? Yeah, I spend it on Blythe (well, and other things to, but this is BlytheLife.com, after all!).

Do the people in your life know how much Blythe costs?