Adventures of Various Sorts.

Mostly just me sewing for my dolls and some other projects. Occasional doll nudity, pg-13 romance. Overall SFW

[purr-in-ink]

[dollsahoy]

Kmart Australia "Dark Academy" doll, wearing a dress I made about 20 years ago, which was inspired by something I saw in some vintage Licca dresses

This doll is slimmer than Blythe--I'm pretty sure the torso is a knock off of a modern Skipper or Stacie (I don't have much experience with either.) The back says Sariel in a script typeface, and a quick look found lots of cheap Barbie knock offs with that "brand" name

This doll is very lightweight--the hair probably makes up half the doll's mass. I believe the hair is nylon, not the highest quality, but still glossy and with decent heft, and so smooth that it feels slightly oily (I haven't done a burn test)

The arms and legs are a slightly soft plastic, and the doll's original black socks and underwear did stain the legs. Blue and green tone plastic is notorious for all the color lifting with benzoyl peroxide treatment, and the lower leg stains are light, so I'm not worrying about it. But. That is why she's wearing white hosiery

The feet can wear Barbie high heel shoes, which is nice. I don't normally like when teen/child dolls have high heel feet, but at least this one doesn't have an unusual foot size for those high heels

I also used acetone to carefully remove a set of stitches painted near one eye. I don't need her to pretend to be Frankie Stein.

[goatiegogo]

Hiya, want to support a queer artist and get yourself some custom earrings for Pride? Look no further than my fiancé's store!

All hooks are hypoallergenic, and you can request them to be changed into clip-ons (much less ouchy than many other clip-ons I've tried!). You can also request unique variations, including size, metal, and new flags.

(And if you use this link specifically it extra helps us!)

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1486097864/pride-flag-gradient-tassel-native-fringe

[porcelain-dollbones]

you spend as much time as possible taking a desire and slowly pushing it down and giving it as little air as possible, until it shrinks down, until it occupies the smallest space possible. you learn to be okay with never satisfying it, with letting it be a small and private fantasy in the far corners of your mind. you convince yourself you cant have it, and maybe shouldnt want it anyway, and let it slowly waste away. but you havent allowed it to die. you cant.

and then u get the smallest taste of what its like. youre reminded of how it feels. like a taste of honey after convincing yourself you can live on water. and all of a sudden, all the feelings are back. you cant live without it. your heart is prised open so easily after all the work you did to shutter it, and it hurts, wretchedly, pathetically. and at once, you want more, but resent the taste as well. resent it for not letting you forget.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Common Green Lacewings: these tiny insects build loosely-woven cocoons that measure just 3-6mm (about 1/8 to 1/4 inch) in diameter

Each lacewing spends about 5 days maturing inside its cacoon, and then it cuts an opening in the top and emerges as a fully-developed adult.

Above: a common green lacewing emerging from its cocoon

Green lacewing larvae (genus Chrysopidae) are also known as "aphid lions," because they're voracious predators that often feed on aphids. They've also been known to prey upon caterpillars, leafhoppers, planthoppers, thrips, spiders, mites, and insect eggs, which is why they're widely used to help eradicate pests in agricultural contexts.

Once the lacewing nears the end of its larval stage, it builds a small cacoon out of silk and then tucks itself inside, allowing the pupal phase to begin. Its tiny green body is often partially visible through the thin, loosely-woven walls of the cacoon.

Above: a lacewing developing within its cocoon

These breathtaking photos of a lacewing climbing out of its cacoon were taken by a Danish photographer named Frederik Leck Fischer.

Above: the lacewing preparing to emerge

When the insect initially emerges, its wings and antennae are still compactly folded down against its body, and the wings have a dark, shriveled appearance that makes them almost unrecognizable.

Above: the fully-developed lacewing waiting for its wings to expand

The wings then gradually expand until they have reached their full size, which usually takes about an hour or two.

Above: the same lacewing just a few hours later

Fischer's photographs provide a stunning account of the entire process.

Above: close-up of a common green lacewing

This is a rewritten version of a post that I originally published three years ago.

Sources & More Info:

iNaturalist: Common Green Lacewing

University of California: Family Chrysopidae

Texas A&M: The Green Lacewing

Washington State University: Lacewings

Tennessee State University: Insect Predators: Green Lacewings (PDF)

Pacific Pests and Pathogens: Green Lacewings

[beggars-opera]

Me: Augh I managed to finish everything on this dress so nicely except this one part and I can't figure out how to do it well so I gave up and it looks like shit

Abby Cox: Every single bit of this antique is put together like shit

Me: 0o0

[ramalamacreatures]

Glow in the dark Coconut Octopus, sculpted from polymer clay (☉‿☉✿)

[roseschmits]

Tentacle pots and spider pots

Porcelain

Available on www.roseschmits.com

Worldwide shipping

[notlayingroses]

Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday

[queenofsquids]

crocheted a hat today from this tutorial.

the whole time I was thinking wow this is tiny I'm doing so good this is totally gonna fit a Barbie but in the end it was too big 😅

but I managed to squeeze it onto little Betsey Clark instead

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[naamahdarling]

Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

Jesus Christ this is exactly the thing.

[anyaboz]

Clown Persian Cat Room Guardian

FOR AUCTION

[kosomolski-dolls]

A tiny doll I fell in love with at LDoll 2018 (and so did Fáelán), and when my friend sold her shortly after, I grabbed her immediately!

She has been adopted by Eva an Fáelán immediately

(I still want to make a baby carrier for Fáelán xD)

I made her a new wig a while back, and one day I might bring myself to repaint her.

[queenofsquids]

alright, take 3 on the crochet hat

mostly following this video but smaller brim

it's adorable but needs a lot of styling to get there. just plopping it on the head looks silly. have to pinch and situate everything just so. a little too tedious for my tastes, I'm more of the plopper type 😆

[doctorbeth]

A local teddy bear

A lot of my patients fly in solo, from all over the globe. But this one was a local bear who needed help.

You can see he’s pretty chubby, but he’d lost some stuffing from gravitational settling, particularly on his head and joints. His seams were suffering from the expansion (not just the ones in the photo). These were all treatable issues. He did have some light scarring on the side of his face from a previous accident, but the fur still felt nice, so treating it would be more invasive, and so I didn’t recommend that.

It took some time for him to come in, because his person, who is quite young, wasn’t ready for him to be gone for long, and so not only were there timing issues, but there was a question as to whether to have him cleaned as well, which would extend his stay. Eventually, everyone was ready and one Wednesday afternoon, after his youngster’s school, he was dropped off.

He started his care with the spa:

All new stuffing once he was dry relieved the lumpiness in his pre-op photos. But he still got a small amount of original stuffing in a heart in his chest:

Once restuffed, it was time to minimize his older seam scarring, and tighten up his other seams. Here he is, all better:

He went home to a very happy little girl and her family. They wrote:

He looks fantastic and D is so happy to have him back looking and feeling like new.

Thank you so much for your work on this.

They also asked for his story to be shared, so this is for D and her teddy bear. :-)

**********

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in my substack newsletter, doctorbeth.substack.com. It's free, and you get the stories straight to your inbox. I also do occassional retro posts from the backlog through the newsletter. But don't worry, I'll keep posting everything new here too.

[tenasilvertear]

Started back at work again. Wish me luck. Still trying to stave off foreclosure. Not doing a great job of it. There's almost no aid in my zip code.

If you can keep passing the hat I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

https://ko-fi.com/tenasilvertear

[homunculus-argument]

Randomly remembered seeing this random old black and white photo from like the 50s, pretty sure it was from Sweden. A picture from a morgue, of a tall blond man in some kind of an uniform approaching another man standing beside an opened coffin, clutching something to his chest while looking at the approaching man with a look of wary insult on his face. The caption explained that this was an incident of a police officer stopping a man from putting a bottle of beer in his father's coffin (his own father, not the cop's father) because for some reason doing that was against Sweden's burial laws.

I don't remember the details but I recall how the guy had the looks of a rough life written all over him, ragged clothes in contrast to the police officer's pristine uniform - though obscured by motion blur as he was rapidly approaching with hateful intent - and the much finer burial clothes of the deceased. A small, skinny man with black hair, holding onto the bottle that's about to be confiscated like it's something precious to him.

I felt like something wasn't adding up and went to the comments to see if there was additional context that was missing from all this, and there was: The son and the father were Romani, and at least at the time it was still very much a tradition in Swedish Romani culture to bury the dead with little gifts - not necessarily extravagant or expensive, but things that the lost loved one would have liked.

This wasn't about a mourning son being stopped from playfully paying his respects in a way that someone else thought indignified. This was about a man being prohibited from performing his own peoples' funeral rites.

[vvlpecvlae]

Had to go find the photo, it's indeed Swedish. Taken by Åke Borglund and photo of the year 1958, apparently.

Source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021016531349/arets-bild-1958-tagen-i-stillhetens-kapell-tid-uppstandelsens-kapell-i

[homunculus-argument]

Holy fuck you found it.

I misremembered, it wasn't a morgue, those are empty church pews.

[vvlpecvlae]

After finding and posting the photo above, I did some more research and found out where it was originally published. Long story short, I now own a 1958 issue of Se, which was a Swedish magazine for photojournalism, inspired by Life and other similar publications.

The photo comes from an article on a Swedish Romani funeral in Karlstad (a city 300 km west of Stockholm). The text is pretty exoticising and othering, I won't bother translating the whole thing. But I will relay the most interesting information.

First of all, the deceased man is Josef Dimetri (1903-1958), who was a Romani chief. From what I can tell from the Swedish censuses, he left behind a wife and six children, ages 18-31.

Which means that the photo is a bit deceptive on its own - the chapel is still empty there, but the article states it was taken shortly before the rest of the guests arrived. Because there were plenty of guests - and there are more photos of them!

The article doesn't explain why the police was there, but it says they had to step in and break off some fighting and arguments that broke out between guests, which is more likely what they were there for (rather than just inspecting bottles). They can also be seen talking to spectators in the last photo, so staving off curious or hostile people might also have been a reason.

And most important, perhaps: While the policeman did try to stop him from leaving the bottle, the son shook him off and protested that "he needs it, he needs it", and "the tactful policeman" (as the article calls him) did not insist further. So it seems Josef Dimetri was in fact laid to rest with his bottle of beer.