I recently celebrated a birthday – I’m now 21 and can legally do all the legal-things a person can do in all countries (barring the ones where women are viewed as objects and whatnot, in which case I’m pretty sure I’d need to seek signed and notarized permission to breathe, let alone blog) which is pretty awesome. I’ve been “in” the Blythe hobby officially since I was 19 and purchased Sophie, my Cappuccino Chat, at a small little store that no longer exists.

For me, Blythe’s been a nice constant to have around. I love my dolls, I love sewing new dresses for them, knitting them things, crocheting things for them. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people because of Blythe, participated in some swaps,  pushed myself to do new things (like picking up sewing again) and I opened this blog. Did I know what I was getting myself into? Not really. I genuinely sort of believed that I could only have one Blythe. I honestly thought that I would make all of my dolls’ clothing by myself (how wrong I was…). But I also thought that I would be one of those people with a gazillion pair of doll shoes and there’s actually nobody wearing shoes at the moment – not even me!

So if you wanted to share, I was wondering…

• How old are you?
• When did you start in the Blythe hobby?
• What thoughts did you have at the beginning that you now realize are wrong?

One of the things I like about Blythe is how pretty they are and I also like changing their clothes from time to time, but I don’t do it particularly often. If you were to take a glance at my 365 photos, you’d think I never change their clothes because my dolls stay in the same outfit for fairly long periods of time. I believe that Bennett, my Margaret Meets Ladybug, has been in the same outfit since perhaps… May? I feel bad, haha.

So I was just wondering how often you change the clothes that your dolls wear! Every day? Once every other week? Once a year? Share!

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Happy November, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Halloween and got lots of candy while trick-or-treating (or just had fun hitting up all the 50%-off candy sales today!). For the voice behind BlytheLife.com, I spent a lot of time studying, cleaning, baking, cooking, doing some laundry and grocery shopping… It was essentially a normal weekend for me (minus the candy sales, of course).

I got an email from a visitor of BlytheLife.com asking me about how much time I put into the website, how I always get the posts out at (generally) the same time all the time.

Well, for the second question (regarding the time), WordPress has a handy-dandy little scheduling feature! I usually write my posts in advanced and schedule them from 12:00pm in my time zone (currently Pacific Daylight Savings, but it will be Pacific Standard on November 7th). Writing the posts in advance is a fantastic way for me to get to think about what I want to say, gather my thoughts, to edit (or try to, I do let some spelling and grammar errors get through sometimes) and source out photos if I don’t have one of my own to use. Like anything, I do my best to put out quality work, I like making lists, I like illustrations, I strive to put out original content at all times.

And as for the amount of time I put into the website… Oh boy. I get a lot of email to sort through each day. There’s usually 50+ spam emails that I delete just by looking at the name of the sender and at the subject title (I’m a woman, I don’t need enlargement supplements of that variety, thank you, and I don’t have any long lost relatives that recently passed away to leave me as the sole heir to billions of dollars). I usually spend about 15 minutes a day on email. I usually set aside a small portion of my week (usually towards the end of the week) to writing new posts, like this one, for future publishing. Interview questions are done as soon as I humanly can, I try to get interviews done fairly quickly to give the person I’m interviewing time to reflect over the questions and pick the photos that they want to showcase. It is a time consuming project, this website, but I really enjoy working on it and the feedback that I get from people – I’ve gotten a lot of support from people in the Blythe community since BlytheLife.com went live in July.

To the person who asked those questions, I hope this post answered them!

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, let me know down below in the comments or contact me!

Dolls (and all their lovely clothing) gets to be expensive after a while and it can take a lot to fund bringing in a new member to the family or new outfits.

For me personally, I use part of the money I earn over the summer when I worked. I check my budget to ensure that I can afford tuition, textbooks and the splurges I average over the year for new clothes, books and other things before buying a new doll.

I know that some people sell handcrafted goods to fund a new doll or do closet clean outs while others customize dolls or just find another method of finding money for that next big purchase.

So the question is: how do you fund your new doll purchases?

It seems that every time that I lack an idea for a 365 photo, I just strip my doll down to nothing and ‘artfully’ cover her up with something like jewellery, the side of a blanket or her own hair. And I know that I’ve seen plenty of photos around with dolls that were carefully arranged so that their ‘naughty bits’ weren’t completely hanging out there. Carefully arranged shoes, ribbons or just not focusing on some parts…

How often do you take photos of your dolls where they’re just carefully covered up enough to make it family-friendly?

At what point do you think that dolly nudity’s in excess? I find that anatomically correct dolls have their time and place, but it also depends on how the dolls are posed and how adult the dolls look (some dolls look very young or resemble Blythe or more mainstream dolls where there are no details).

For me, dolls that carry no anatomically correct details are ‘okay’ for selective dolly nudity while those who are amazingly (and accurately) detailed and posed into crude positions or shown doing awkward and somewhat illegal acts are not. There’s a time and place for nearly everything, except for when there isn’t.

What are your thoughts?