#jly4

[spindledreams]

My enormous house panther making friends.

[eightw]

i don’t love these pictures but i do love mitsumi :)

[sam-started-it]

Achieved the collection goal of having every face mold! They're in release order and are then most recent variation I have of each

[dashing-darlings]

Meet Cassiopeia!

She's sooooooo pretty! I have no idea why #4 was ever discontinued.

She definitely seems to be a pc doll. She has a thicker body and limbs, soft vinyl, really detailed toenails, no tag, and thick long neck strings. It's perfect because I want her to be my 90s character!

So meet Cassiopeia (Cassie) Ouyang! She's turned ten June 18, 1996. She's a bit of a scifi movie buff with Stargate, Independence Day, Jurassic Park being her favorite movies. She's excited for the movie Contact to come out next year as she loved the book. She's not quite sure what she wants to be when she grows up but she knows she either wants to work in the movie industry or in space!

She's Chinese American and can trace her family back to when they entered the United States via California during the age of the gold rush.

I'm so happy to have her!

[spindledreams]

It's amazing how much of a difference eye color can make in two basically identical dolls.

I've been working on sewing this week. I have two more of these to make but I'm pretty happy with this set!

The belt can double as a headband

I should have ironed the pieces before I sewed it. I'll do that with the next two but for this one I'll just have to do what I can with it and hope that crease in the center front will iron or steam out.

[spindledreams]

Finally all done! These dresses took me about three days each.

You've met Chenyu (left, silver eyes) and Chunlan (right). Center is their cousin, Paige.

I was ten when the American Girl of Today line was released. #4 and #6 drew my attention early on. #6 wasn't around long before she was changed to be blonde and green-eyed, so now 6.1 is very hard to find and very expensive when you do find her. (Though this last two weeks I have seen two of them in Facebook groups - for much more money than I wanted to spend.)

Paige is not an official 6.1. I made her using a 1995 Samantha as the base, and the wig and eyes from a pre-Mattel Pleasant Company #4. So she does have authentic parts, only instead of being assembled in a factory in 1995 she was assembled in my kitchen in 2025!

I always thought 4 and 6.1 looked enough alike to pass as siblings or cousins. When I was writing out their character backgrounds in my head, they fell into place for me on their own. (I don't intend to write any official stories. I just really wanted background to feel connected to them as characters in their own right, rather than just "dolls I liked as a kid.")

[spindledreams]

One more dress to finish the set so I can debut one more doll, but I seriously cannot get over how different they look when the *only difference* is their eye color!

[spindledreams]

Guess who finally has a name!

I've been spending more time trying to name this doll than I ever spent naming my actual human children, and Middle Kid had a whole Family Incident involved before she could be named.

Anyway. All I really knew when she got here was that I wanted a Chinese name for her. I started out looking at name meanings and I really liked the meaning of yù, meaning jade, and lán, meaning orchid, but when put together as a name, that means magnolia and I'm active in a group where another active member already has a #4 called Magnolia, and I didn't think we needed two #4s with the same name. So back to the drawing board I went.

I've been on and off searching through Chinese name sites, looking at meanings and sounds and doing *far more research* into Chinese naming traditions than I ever would have expected to do (certainly more than I would have done if I'd gotten this doll at ten years old). I had to rule out most things with q, z, and x because they don't always sound in Chinese the way an English speaker would expect, and for some reason it was important to me that other people would be able to pronounce it correctly, or close to correctly, just by reading it.

So I did what I do and I made a list. I listed all the characters I liked meaning and pronunciation of, I combined them in various ways and checked them against Chinese name websites to make sure they were recognizable as names, and I combined them with various surnames to see what I liked. I came up with eight names.

I was in the kitchen listening to Chinese names over and over on my phone, trying to decide what I liked best, and Middle Kid came in to get a snack (at 1:15am because we are night owls here). She weighed in on every given name and helped me narrow it down to one that we both liked the sound and spelling of, and then I combined it with the surnames I had been considering and we went through the list again.

We finally settled on with Lin Chunlan (林 春兰). I've included the Chinese characters if anyone wants to paste it into a pronunciation tool for a more accurate pronunciation than what I'm bout to type, but it's pronounced lín chūn lán, which sounds something like "leen chuin-lan."

Chunlan means spring orchid. Lin means forest, so it felt like a good fit for a surname.