When this question gets posed to me, I know what the person is really asking is “Who’s your favourite?”. By definition, I should only have one favourite. Because if there was more than one, there’d still be a ranking of who is number one and who is number two. Plastic is unfortunately one of those materials that will melt in a fire, so in the event of a fire, I’d probably try to rescue all of my dolls. You know, if it was safe to do so and I wasn’t putting myself in any dangerous. (Yeah right, I’d probably be the last one out clutching onto my dolls like they were some kind of life raft and somehow going to keep me alive when I walk through the flames.)

That said, whenever I get asked who my favourite is, my answer is to show people my phone. Now, my phone isn’t anything particularly unique (a white Galaxy S3 in a fun lime green case), but it’s the wallpaper that is the most telling part of all. As in who’s featured…

Because, let’s face it, the moment I laid eyes on her Frizziest-ness, I knew that Prim had to be mine. Princess Primrose, Primrose, Prim, Prim-Prim. I’m still incredibly thankful to my friend who a) found her (and her other six sisters that make up the Vancouver Seven) and b) for allowing me to adopt her and her other sister (Miss Lillian Rose). She is, without a doubt, the ‘top’ favourite out of the dolls that I have and I wouldn’t trade her for the world. And yes, that means rescuing her first in the event of a fire because she’d probably rise out of the ashes and beat me senseless if I left her behind and ‘dispose’ of whichever doll(s) I did rescue first.

Which doll would you save in a fire first?

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Lately, I’ve been attempting to organize my dolly things. Clothes, shoes, the dolls themselves. “Attempting” is the key word in that sentence, in case you didn’t catch it. Organization is something that I can struggle with at times. It can be difficult because of the sheer amount of stuff that I own when it comes to my Blythes and all their necessities. I find myself overwhelmed at times, and then when I’m digging through the drawer I sometimes find things that I didn’t realize that I owned. How unfortunate is that? But at the same time, it lends to the feeling of getting something new without having something new arrive in the mail – which is a pretty awesome feeling!

I have two plastic drawer sets and each drawer holds something different – hats/hair accessories, dresses, shirts/tops, pants/skirts/bottoms, stock clothes and the miscellany (Re-ment, other miniatures, doll-sized purses/bags, curlers for the Kenners, etc.) . So while I’m mostly organized when it comes to what goes into what drawer, it’s the inside of the drawers that are messy. So I decided to get some plastic bags and organize. If I buy “designer” items, I tend to end up with a few from each designer- or I get sets (e.g. a dress set would consist of a dress and bloomers of some sort). So I started bagging like-items and it allows me to be more organized. I haven’t gotten around to labeling the bags yet, but that will come in time. Maybe. (Unlikely…)

Here were some of my bagged up dolly clothes – sorted by designer/maker and some are multiple sets in a bag, others are sets as they were meant to be (e.g. dress + underskirt + bloomers):

It’s hard to take photos of things in shiny plastic!

This is a relatively inexpensive project. I bought two boxes of zipped sandwich bags that were $1 for 50 bags. The only problem is finding the time to do all this sorting and organizing. I haven’t made a very large dent yet in my organization, but I like what I’ve done so far.

Since school started nearly a month ago for me (I started two weeks before Labour Day), I’ve been very busy with presentations, assignments, readings, projects and clinical. It doesn’t stop when I want it to and I find myself going for days and weeks on end without even touching my Blythes. This isn’t to say that I no longer like them, the truth couldn’t be farther from that, but rather I’ve had to change my priorities because my education is important to me and that needs to come first. At the same time, I love my dolls and I have missed even having them out with me. Most of them are on display on my desk, but the others are usually tucked away, so I made it a point to pull a few of them out the other day because I just needed some ‘dolly time’.

Not the best photo, but Halo is still adorable!

And it’s not even as if I do it intentionally with the thought of “I’m just going to ignore my Blythes for a few days” because that’s not it at all. Like or not, Real Life can be busy. And unfortunately things like hobbies fall to the wayside. But recent events (like getting dolly mail!) have rekindled my love for the big-eyed dolls that we all know and love. I was recently on “the hunt” for my first BL when I had a large unexpected expense come up, so now I’m needing to really pinch the pennies and just be happy with what I have – not to get caught up in the never-ending cycle of spending money on more and more dolls and doll things. At least for now, I should enjoy what I have. (And the new dolly clothes that recently arrived…)

Do you ever go through periods where you don’t play with your dolls very much? What makes you decide to spend more time with them?

I’d like to start this off by saying that I think eyelid art on Blythe dolls is awesome. Some people (coughcough) do some fantastic work – I don’t understand how people can paint and draw such detailed work on possibly the world’s smallest canvas. It doesn’t make sense to me because I’m pretty sure that if I tried that, I would go permanently cross-eyed from focusing so much. That and I can’t draw for beans, so not only would I be permanently cross-eyed, it’d also be a waste of time because it would not resemble what I want it to look like. Sad, but true.

The best way that I think that eyelid art is showcased on dolls is with sleepy eyes. I’m sure many of you know how sleepy eyes are done on a Blythe doll. For those unfamiliar, you replace the use of the spring on the eye mechanism with a secondary string. So you pull one string to change the eyes and then another string is used to open the eyes. This allows you to temporarily see the eyelids and have the doll “sleep”. (I’ve read online before that it’s not recommended that you leave your dolls “sleeping” for long periods of time because it can result in damage to the eye mechanism due to stress.)

While I love the idea of getting to see eye lids from time to time, only two of thirteen of my Blythes have sleepy eyes. This is mostly due to the fact that I am terribly lazy when it comes to my dolls. When I need to change to the next set of chips, it’s because there’s a specific set that I want to have facing for photos and I don’t like having the added step of pulling an extra string. Plus, I have a hard enough time as it is finding charms for the main pull string – now I need to find charms or something neat for another string? That’s just so much work! So, sadly, only two of my dolls have sleepy eyes. The rest just get dosed up with some caffeine so that they can stay up for all hours of the day!

How do you feel about sleepy eyes on your Blythes?