#jt rambles

which is why i'm (long windedly) trying to ask. is there a perceptible-by-humans difference other than the price tag? anybody know?

Okay, now I go bed. At 6am. Oops. :P

So me and dolly disability is apparently a Thing, hence the diabetes care kit for Gabriela. Most of this other stuff is also planned for Gabriela, and I'm looking over Laser Eyes' old collection to pick out stuff for Gabbi as well. I've pretty much decided the purple Pop Star Karaoke dress and necklace are gonna be Gabi's when she gets here (at some point after I get a job and am able to pay the rent consistently, lol); I'm thinking I might pair those with the "Sparkle Sneakers", unless Gabbi just wears her tap shoes all the time, which is a thing that might happen. They're very cool tap shoes. :D I've also got an assortment of t-shirts and jeans for Gabi, as well as the outfit with the happy ghosties top and the candycorn tights, and the one gorgeous sparkly ice skating outfit, and the pink and neon green track outfit. And I'm pretty certain I'm gonna take the pants from the Pomeranian jammies -- they have an adorable allover pawprint pattern on them! -- and pair them with her "Imagine Dream Create" pajama top. I'm thinking very hard about the Ombré Ballet dress; I still hope to source the recently discontinued ballet and jazz outfits for Gabi at some point, but the Ombre Ballet outfit is pretty, and is not pale pink in that really obnoxious "look at me i am FLESH COLOURED" kind of way. ;P Then, too, the Rainbow Sprinkles outfit is not only adorable, it's got jelly sandals! ^_^ I always wanted those as a kid, but now my feet are too elderly and cantankerous to wear them, so I require dolly jelly sandals. XD Aduke doesn't generally ask for much, but when she does it's a doozy. She very definitely wants Kit's green daybed up there instead of the yellow bunk bed (which I am falling out of love with), and she also wants the Gourmet Kitchen, which has roughly 65 tiny little pieces and is as large in every direction as she is. Apparently her main interest aside from historical cosplay is cookery. Who knew? O_O

See, this one, I actually own, and I'm pretty much chill about letting it go? I have the pattern, I know I can sew a copy -- being arsed to find the correct sizes of lace is the hardest part. I've gotten to fiddle with the interchangeable stomachers and the pinner cap and the little tiny necklace. This is a... just a super classic example of how I play with my dolls? Sometimes I buy things and I'm gonna keep them. More often, I just need to see the thing in person, maybe fiddle with it for a while, try it on all my dolls, photograph it, maybe figure out the construction, try to copy it, develop an informed opinion on it, and then I'm ready to let it go. So it's sort of hard to figure out whether a particular thing is "worth" the purchase price to me, cos it's... I don't know if I'm buying it for resale or to keep. I don't know. I'm weird about dolls, maybe. ;P Other people seem to have a "want" feeling that reliably sticks around after they have the thing? And often a wiring that can handle owning ten, twenty, thirty dolls at a time. A lot of things, I only want temporarily, and I can only focus on or enjoy so many things at a time. I know there are some other people who prefer limited collections, but the temporary revolving-door sort of thing seems a bit... it makes me feel un-normal, within the doll-collecting world. Hell, within the world at all, it's like -- you're supposed to, if you want a thing, and then you get it, you're supposed to keep wanting it, otherwise you never really wanted it at all? Am I making any sense? It's this... it's that same retroactive lack of fluidity you get in a lot of queer contexts. If I'm a girl *now*, I must never have been a boy, and vice versa, kind of thing. It's not... common to be like "yes, I did want this, and now I have had it, and I have satisfied my wanting of it, and now it can go away cos it lives in my heart". Is it? I can't think of anybody who is even remotely like that. But, like... I mean, it's objects. They don't grow and change. With people, you're not like "nope, you were my friend, but I have gotten all the enjoyment out of you, so bye". Sometimes friends do grow apart, the person they are now is not the person present-you wants to be around, irrelevant of whether past-you and past-them were good together. But with objects, it's like... I don't know, I'd just expect it to be a lot more common, for somebody to be like "yup, there was a set amount of enjoyment for me to get out of that possession, and I have gotten it, and now I will pass the object on to someone else for them to enjoy". Like, my present willingness to get rid of the object doesn't invalidate my past enjoyment of it. Does that not... happen to other people? :S

A lot of my feelings about Kirsten's clothes in particular are less about them as doll clothes, and more about my childhood feelings toward performative femininity and gender and also the Little House books. It's a complicated bunch of shit. This outfit represents what I wanted at one point -- it's female-coded by being a dress, but not frilly or froofy at all; it's blue, not pink or pastel; it's made of sturdy-looking materials you don't have to fuss about, a good practical farm-working day dress, but it's got little bits of embroidery to dress it up. It's not what you'd call explicitly butch, but it's also not at all what you'd call femme. Hell, give me a shawl with longer tails so I could tie them around my waist and leave my arms free, I would still wear this, eyelet pantalets and all. (I used to beg for pantalettes with ruffles as a kid. Never got 'em. Still don't know why.) I'd look weird enough that I probably couldn't wear it to work, but I *like* this look.

Hollywood, CA