From a Narcoleptic Insomniac

The Dormouse Awakes . . . to find projects galore all started up.
We did get in on Project Dollway again this year; I don't have the required Antoinette doll to design for, so we had to do some creative evening wear design to work around that. I also just read about a 19 pt articulated Fashion Doll on the Couture Doll Competition, and I must get a look-see at that one.
I am set for dolls -- I never thought I'd say that -- and have fitting models galore, all of whom I am fond of . . . .

Not all of it is sleeping: I am just now, once again, recovering from what has become the traditional summer biennial Computer Shutdown. I thought that since I spent 18 months getting Vista to work with me that I might get an extra eighteen months out of it before having to buy a new one -- the tradition --- but noooo, right on schedule, the week before IFDC, it went on the fritz.
This time we opted to repair it -- and boost the memory. It cost as much as getting a new one and took longer, with the puter in for repair, and on top of that the last geek tech lost the Vista software that Microsoft had sent me to straighten out the problem that I worked on for eighteen months -- the last three of them on an every day basis with "escalation" level support in Shanghai.


I'm back and getting back on my feet as far as catching up with all the mess that piles up while the computer is going on the fritz and with reinstalling programs I need.


Under the weather perhaps -- something like light-headed, only at the very top of my head, with the rest feeling like lead.


Summer is ending and I didn't have my pool, promise by promise and hope by hope devouring the last one month by month and week by week and day by day until today when I got More Glue Please! for another patch on the pool. At least I make a darned good patch: the first one I made held well, and then the pool got another hole a few feet away. Not on a level surface pulls the bottom up the side and makes a stress point. All of it is work I shouldn't have had to do if I had had help putting it away for the winter: and I cleaned it fully four times to do so. A thorn in my side. The DH doesn't get it yet, that I need water, and here I am in Texas, so some extra effort needs to be made.



The pool in 2008

"I grew up at the beach," I told him, knowing his answer would be, "So did I."
"Mmmm hmmm. Venice is not the same as 'the beach.' When I say I grew up at the beach I mean I spent all day every day on the beach, swimming and hanging out. I grew up at the beach means I grew up on it. I survived in Taiwan by working early in the morning, taking the bus home and getting off at the American School Pool and lying there all afternoon, swimming, napping, reading, until the evening, and then I went home. I need water."

I did go out and play on my slip-n-slide a bit this summer, waiting for the pool on one of the numerous fills that only pointed up what can be described as "I told you so."
Well, that was certainly a mixed bag of reportage. Back to my teapot -- and my catch up on the latest Naruto episodes: I finally got the programs running so that I could get them on DVD to watch lying down.

Google Ads

These look nice -- I just signed up for ads, and the links I see are fully related to the content of this blog, so I am pleased to present to you the links to doll-related sites which advertise with Google.

Please click on them, as they are, as Google sponsors, sponsors of my blog.

I'll so my best to post shorter posts more frequently.

Don't look for me to be tweeting on Twitter; I'd be embarrassed to say the words and embarrassed to be competing for a number of "followers." It's all gone too far, the pulling oneself out of where he is and what he is doing to tell people where he is and what he is doing.

I wonder if Andy Warhol saw that coming, the self-awareness, no the self-conscious megalomania of it all.

I had had it with cellphones, cellphone use in public while engaged in something else, when they first came out. I wish I could pass on the Hong Kong HHH joke about them, but it's not only not for families but not for most Americans' ("oh, pssst shhhh psss mmmbl pssss") prudishly tender eyes and ears.

The last straw with cellphones was seeing people chatting away in the grocery store while the teller was totalling their purchases and asking for payment. Nice way to really show disregard and disrespect for service people as invisible non-entities with whom one might want to interact, eh?

People are getting very far removed from reality through these small communications devices that give the illusion of being "in touch with the world."

I, myself, do love to blog, as I think about things and have not been in touch with many people who do so also for the past seven years; it's also good for my writing.

--Alison

The challenges, as I can recall . . . up to tangential additions

God DAMN this thing: a nice long post and this time I remembered how they disappear and carefully highlighted from the top instead and it disappeared when I got to the bottom, going into "save" mode immediately.

what's left:

(although it took me forever to find them -- an adage we've discovered in Project Dollway: "When you have just the piece of fabric for a project, it is nowhere to be found.")

Barbie Turns 50

Dummy Text

Barbie will celebrate her 50th Anniversary as a fashion doll this year on 9 March (she's a Pisces, folks), and suddenly a mayor in West Virginia (South Carolina??) has proposed banning the doll from shelves because she offers an unattainable goal to young girls. Well, duh.

I was eleven or twelve when she first came out and I didn't like them: it was the eyes and the shape of the head and the miniature hands and bound feet . . . and did I mention the unrealistic body?

Perhaps the Mayor is thinking of protecting the children from their mothers.

The doll was intended for older children, which one would think would be obvious enough; however, since the first few years she was out, maybe since the first girls to own them started having their own children, girls have grown up teething on them.

I didn't like them until about five years ago when I found a blonde Barbie and an AA Nichele dumped at the edge of a field, along with a variety of other vinyl dolls, across from a nursery school/day care center. They had done their duty and were unceremoniously dumped, like racing greyhounds after they've served their time.

I threw all of them in the washing machine and washed them on hot -- my usual practice with "found objects" that aren't metal or glass. It got them clean and it was not until later that I discovered that it had also loosened up their neck joints.

I picked them up because I had needed a fitting model for years for a doll wedding dress I had started to crochet and which looked impossibly small at the torso and waist. It fit perfectly. I switched to the AA doll because she was less offensively vapid-looking than the standard blonde. During the course of finishing the dress, I began to admire that doll and the designers for her wider, flatter nose and fuller lips; she was not what I had seen as the AA versions before, a dark vinyl poured into the standard wide-eyed and grinning Barbie mold. While trying to get her hair into a manageable state or back to the state it had been in before I threw her in the washing machine still dressed in her hillbilly shorts, I spent some time experimenting with various braided hairdos . . . one of which gave me the idea to make a Frida Kahlo doll, a sort of ironic iconic twist, I thought, and set out looking for a brunette Barbie. That turned out to be a far more difficult task than I had imagined: I knew Mattel had come out with a number of "representative" dolls, and I was shocked to find shelf after shelf of the good old Barbies, the blondes, and not a brunette to be found.

I did, however, find the new My Scene dolls on the shelves, among them a lovely Brunette: Nolee. Since I would be repainting the face, I figured that with a change in the eye size, the head size would not be disturbingly large (and gak, kaff kaff when those hideous B---z came out; the boys have their uses, with some head swapping, and it was some time before I discovered that). When I got her home and undressed her (sorry, that's just what girls do with dolls; the first thing they do is see what kind of underwear she's wearing: hence, "real dolls wear underwear"), I was taken immediately with the lovely new body that Barbies had been given -- although I did not know at the time that that same body was on newer Barbies -- and went out to get several more.

to be continued, here . . .. . . holdilng that thought . . .


. . .
She's more of a fetish than a role model or feminine ideal; kids know that.

. . .
the totally unflabbale affability of the wide-eyed grinning Barbie
. . . .

Luisa Luna and the Sepulveda family

Challenge Four: Layers

Marine layers, geological layers, layers of clothing -- textural contrasts within: tight and heavy with airy and bulky over are the kinds of layers we see in fashion.


How many layers can there be??

Kimonos, layer after layer after layer.

The layers of the onion.

Jawbreakers have layers, and inside a pepper or anise seed. I can't be trusted with jawbreakers: I chew away at everything. Went to bed last night with severe pain in a crowned tooth: thought I had broken the tooth inside the crown, broken the crown, or worn through it (as I had done to another gold crown I'd had since my early 20s). I had gobbled away at (an undisclosed amount of) Good & Plenty: great cigarette substitutes and something to do to keep myself in one spot working. . . .

Challenge Three: Dolman

Yes, so I have a couple of dolman-sleeve sweaters, one a nice dusty rose angora sweater I bought on the street in Hong Kong years ago, earmarked for reuse for dolls due to some actual moth holes in the back; wouldn't it have been simple enough to do with it what I already had in mind, use it for doll clothes? Take a picture of it in its original shape and then duplicate it at 1/3 the size. But nooooo, why take the easy route? I figured that when I finished another more elaborate dolman project, a jacket-dress, I could make the sweater to wear under it.

"When I finished another more elaborate dolman . . . . project . . . ????" It has kicked my ass. Eighteen hours straight, finishing what I spent I don't know how many hours straight just making the embellished cloth, the altered fabric, and . . . .
O.K. the inspiration was one from many many years ago, the design for the fabric, which I've been collecting labels for for forty years. The labels on this are not those I collected; those are set aside, probably in my old brocade sewing box.

A stronger inspiration, or a more recent one, is Bill Griffith saying through Zippy when Zippy visits Japan and finds his non-sequiturs to be most appropriate. At one point, he exclaims, "What's yours is mine and what's mine is labeled."

Last, then, another part of the label theme is, "O.K., so ask me who I'm wearing [just try it, I tell you, just try it]."

My leftover turkey gravy is about to boil over -- got to get something in my stomach and get back to finishing up this "elaborate dolman project."

added later more notes and I forgot to add "Idiocracy" to the inspirations:

More of these labels had been cut out of garments than I had anticipated, which added to work time considerably. Ideally, they would all be stitched together, one by one, to make a more fluid garment. Washing this garment will serve to do that somewhat. As it is, in the try-on, I see a lot of the iron on tape not completely melted to the fabrics.

I could have used glue and didn't, because I didn't want it to thicken or stiffen the garment too much. At the moment it looks like one of those Japanese men's butterfly vests from the Warlord era in Japan. Hmmmm . . . that may well have been a part of the inspiration, come to think of it. The other part of the inspiration has to be Harajuka (Harajuki??) Girl, which is Evelyn herself. What a gorgeous client she is.

Then there is also my love for patches on my HHH Jacket -- more like Girl Scout Badges than advertising as on race car drivers' jackets (which this has an odd resemblance to too, in spite of all the time I spent arranging and rearranging those labels by value and color). In reference to it looking like the race car drivers' sponsors logos on their clothing, there is also, just for a bit of "The Future is Now," the fabric worn by everyone in "Idiocracy." Hopefully we are emerging from that future period just this year . . . .

I remember when it started, that branding, in the late 1970s, early 80s. I spent most of the 1980s in Taiwan, so I was able to maintain a certain purity of spirit in regard to labels. Many of them were made there anyway and more recent arrivals on the island would exclaim, "Oh, that's a Liz Claiborne" or such to my mumbled, "Oh, yes, it is. Is that a brand that people know?"

Now people speak of branding themselves, making themselves marketable by being a brand, a type, more or less: I first noticed it on "I Know My Kid's a Star!" when one episode of the show was devoted to the children's seeking to work out their "branding."

I don't know. The Sepulveda Girls and I just call ourselves Rancho de Doble (also Rancho D Doble) for our clothing brand: special clothes for the fit and big breasted woman that won't make you look dumpy: built like that, you have two choices, button it up to the neck and look dumpy so that women won't glare at you and men won't talk to your breasts, or tighten up the top and lower the neckline to compensate for Big Girls' Blouse Syndrome and just let men talk to your breasts and women sneer with their eyes, in sidelong glances.

That's different too: a whole generation of females, several generations it seems, go out and buy two focal points for men to talk to -- and they don't seem to get tired of it.

I saw an article some time this year that correlated high IQ with big breasts: maybe that's the difference in the attitude toward men talking to your chest. If you have something to say, you'd like someone to focus on your eyes and mouth for a little bit.

branding . . .

let's get back to that as it applies to clothing labels. When it first started, I laughed long and loud on reading an article about a man going to play tennis and getting all the stuff he was supposed to have, each with a label on them. To paraphrase from a thirty year old memory, he said he put on his tennis whites, his Adidas shoes, his white branded Nike tennis shirt, his (op?) white shorts and his (brand name) Titanium tennis racket and by the time he arrived on the court he was a walking identity crisis.

Challenge Two: Pleats

aw gee, where's my saved draft?? this one disappeared too -- in highlighting to change the font -- and then saved again just as I was to post this, so the original text ha desaparecido.

If it ain't one thing . . . it's anotha.

Also, bummah, we have been requested not to show any of our pieces until after the whole project -- all of the challenges -- is done.