Happy St. Patrick's Day!

These dolls are Holly and Poppy O'Hair, from Ever After High. With a last name like O'Hair, they are obviously Irish! :)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I hope that if you wanted to celebrate everything Irish today, that you had a good time! Mr. BTEG and I went out to lunch, and at least one person at every table was wearing green, and there was lots of Irish music played on the music system.

I somehow end up going back to Sydney for St. Pat's pictures often. She just looks like she should be wandering out on the moors while wearing a fisherman's sweater, with a Irish wolfhound striding beside her. Maybe I should try to set up a picture like that for next year! And Sophie loves wearing her shamrocks dress.

I shot these pictures through the ring light, which is nice to be able to do when photographing, I think. I had to try to shoot around the big umbrella light awkwardly, on occasion. I used the "mixed" light setting on the ring.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Erin and Ju-Ting are celebrating St. Patrick's Day at their favorite Irish bar.

I ended up having to take pictures at my own favorite restaurant to use on the backdrop wall of the bar, because it's really hard to find good pictures online that aren't quite expensive. It was fun to make, though. Hope you enjoy St. Patrick's Day if you're also celebrating!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

At Ever After High, the O'Hair twins are giving a tea party for St. Patrick's Day, using a special tea set from their great-grandmother. Madeline Hatter was invited, since everyone has discovered that she'll crash any tea party that she's not invited to, anyway. However, she did bring a tray of delicious macaroons from her father's Haberdashery and Tea Shop. Jillian Beanstalk is the fourth guest.

If the leaves in the forest are green, can a shamrock ever be seen?

The teapot, four cups, shamrock shaped plate, and ten cookies, are a Megahouse set. It also came with a clear spoon and fork, with a shamrock at the top of the handle, and a basket to store the cups. The spoon is on the table in the pics above, although you may not be able to see it very well.

On eBay, I happened upon a duplicate set to this one, only the teapot and cups were white, and not clear.

There were also a couple of other different sets that Megahouse made with a clear/solid version.

In the Ever After High webisodes, Jillian does have some sort of British Isles accent, that sometimes sounds Irish, so we're going with her being Irish. In trying to find out exactly what her accent was, Mr. BTEG discovered that Jillian's voice actress is originally from Cleveland, though. :)

Craft Store Haul

This actual shopping trip dates from a while back. I wanted to take care of some other things on the blog first, and then real life went sideways for a while, but I still want to share my fun finds! A lot of these items are for spring events that have passed, but they're all re-usable, so that's no big deal.  I bought all these things at Pat Catan's, which only has stores in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Pat Catan's was bought by Michael's craft store a while back, but still maintains its own stores and identity.

This is probably the least successful purchase that I made, from a size perspective, anyway. The basket is very nice, and I knew it was going to be big for the 1/6 set, but I was hoping it would pass for a storage basket, the kind you have in your living room that you store blankets in or whatever. However, the basket is just too big for that. I'm sure I'll find some kind of use for it.

On the floor is a "magazine" that came with a Barbie fashion set. Basket is definitely too big to store 1/6 size magazines.

Next are some St. Patrick's Day/Irish themed pendants. They're too big for Barbie and friends to wear on a necklace, but I could make them work as decoration, either on clothes or in a diorama scene. I wanted to grab these mostly because they're seasonal.

Next is a jar of items which may not be exciting to most of you, but I think they might be useful for me, mostly for my Ever After High stories and dioramas. I bought a jar of twigs! Yes, I can just get some from outside of my house, but these don't come with any worries about bugs, and I believe they're treated so that they don't start coming apart, like I think most twigs from outdoors would already be doing.

Also in the not-so-exciting category are these small red and green doilies. I bought these because they were cheap, I think I will probably be able to make some use of them, and I thought I might as well grab them because these colors are seasonal.

At some point I showed you some blue and white lanterns that I bought.

On this trip, I bought pink and white lanterns, and a yellow birdhouse. All are good sizes for 1/6.

Unless you sew for your dolls, this pack won't mean much. It is a set of nylon plastic-y bars to press bias strips, ostensibly for quilting. Supposedly, a hook on one end will help you turn the strips right side out, which was the more interesting part to me, as it can be a difficult task, especially the smaller the strip. I do want to try more quilting, but I can also see bias strips being used on 1/6 dresses with straps, or even to make a Celtic design on an outfit. I might not have bought this set, however, except that it was on clearance.

I picked up some St. Patrick's Day scrapbook paper, since I knew that would disappear as soon as the holiday was over. It's not suitable for wallpaper, but I figured I could use it for decoration.

I did cut some shamrock shapes out to use as decoration for my St. Patrick's Day diorama.

You can also see green shamrock lights. Some of the most fun things I bought on my shopping trip were several strings of small lights, a good size for doll dioramas. Again, these are seasonal. I bought the green shamrocks, red hearts, multi-color flowers, and purple butterflies. Sounds like a box of Lucky Charms cereal. XD I want to pick up some red, white and blue lights soon for use in a July 4th diorama. I'm sure mini lights with those colors will be available right now.

Although these crowns are maybe a little small for 1/6, I had to buy them! I think they were only a dollar each, or less, so I bought four, two silver and two gold. Next time I go back, I might buy one or two more if they still have them. I'm sure I can find uses for them. If they were attached to something else (maybe a veil?), they might even look not too out of proportion, as a small crown to wear on the head, with some tiny jewels added. I think it suits the petite girl best as far as size. They would be cute as little princess headwear for Stacie size too.

Lastly, I bought a scrapbook paper book that I loved so much, that I paid full price for it! :O Or at least full price minus my Pat Catan's discount. It is a book of fairy tale style sheets, and although not all of them will work as wallpaper, I think they would all make beautiful backdrops for fairy tale dioramas, and of course the Ever After High crew will be perfect for this. So that's going to be an ongoing project for a while, creating dioramas one or two at a time and putting them up here. I won't put up any pictures now, as I want every new diorama to be a surprise! :) I'm looking forward to it, but of course I wanted to get this stuff up first. It's way overdue as it is.

These items are not doll-related at all, but I've talked about decorating Eastern European style Easter eggs with BlackKitty, so I wanted to show her this endcap display. I didn't pick up any of these things, because I'd already blown my budget on doll stuff, and because we didn't really have any room to decorate eggs for Easter this year anyway. I've seen these items at Pat Catan's for at least one previous Easter, so I'm hoping they'll have these items again next Easter. At some point I really would like to try the craft.

Do you have favorite items to buy at the craft store? How often do you get sucked in buying cool stuff you happen to find?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Been really busy today, partially putting this room together. Barbie and the gang are hanging out a friend's waiting for the limousine to pick them up before they head out to enjoy the evening at their favorite Irish restaurant/bar.

St. Patrick's Day is a big deal around here. I actually did see a stretch SUV limousine parked outside one of the local Irish restaurants at about three, and the restaurant had to be packed to the rafters, considering the parking lot was overflowing. I also saw at least three limo-buses driving around, one with people all dressed in green clothes.

The shamrock lights and shamrock paper I got during my latest trip to the craft store. I'll be blogging about that; I picked up a lot of really nice things on that trip. I'll also be writing a post about my new room box set-up, which you can see above. Floors and walls can be switched in and out, and now I just have to create a bunch of nice window and floor sets to use.

Erin go bragh!