Barbie Sweet Orchard Farm Fashion Pack

I was in Walmart yesterday and checked out the Barbie aisle, like you do. I found a fashion pack I'd been interested in and decided I didn't want it, when I glanced further down the aisle and saw a large pack in the Sweet Orchard Farm section. Mattel has had some farm dolls and play sets for a while, but they currently produce a whole line of dolls, playsets and vehicles called Sweet Orchard Farm. I couldn't find this pack online on either Amazon or Walmart.com after I got home, but there the pack was in the store, brightly colored and appealing. When I noticed that the two dresses both appeared to also be printed on the back, I leaped over and grabbed a box. They *were* printed on the back, and there was also a t-shirt, a skirt, shorts, a vest, a hat, a purse, and a pair of short boots. The whole set looked decent, for $9.97, so into the cart it went. I'm going to share all the pictures from my photo shoot, and then talk about the pros and cons, at the end.

Pros:
-The only piece that isn't finished in some way is the flowered skirt, and only the hem is unfinished. Since the skirt is made of knit fabric, it shouldn't unravel.
-The pieces are very wearable, for everyday. Although that rose dress *is* a little short. Even the vest, though, looks better on than I thought it would.
-Most of the items were not held on by tags in the package! Maybe Mattel has heard all the complaints about tags tearing holes in clothing? Most of the clothes were merely slipped over cardboard tabs in the box, but they all looked fine in package. The vest was held in by tags, but the fabric is woven, and a little thick, so there was not as much chance of it developing a hole. The hat and purse were also held down by tags, but the tags on the purse went through the "loops" holding the strap to the purse. Once you pulled the tags free, you could slide the tags out because the tags had small ends on the back side of the cardboard.
-The dresses are printed on both sides!! The ribbon belt does not go all the way around the back of the checked dress, but that's not as big of an issue, and happens on real clothes sometimes.

Cons:
- Except for the shorts, all the clothing pieces have no back openings. You have to sliiiiide the dresses and t-shirt on, and those clothes are tight! There is not a lot of give, even though the pieces are knit. I wonder how they fit on a non-MtM Barbie? The Sweet Orchard Farm dolls all have straight arms and legs.
- The hem isn't finished on the flowered skirt. I think the skirt looks not quite right, because of that. It looks unfinished, because of course it is.

If you find this pack at your local Walmart, or another store that happens to carry it, I'd definitely pick it up. The shirt, shorts and vest will all work with other things, and the boots and purse are cute. I definitely want to perk them up with some paint details. The dresses would be nice with jackets and pumps, to make different looks. Even the hat can be worn with other styles. I would have liked to see back openings, but then again, maybe the backs wouldn't match the fronts of the dresses then. The rose dress does not have a front or a back; it's two identical pieces sewn together. Plus, the pack wouldn't have been $9.97 if more of the pieces had closures. I do wonder what it would cost though; I wonder if I would think the price was worth it.

While I was pulling the hay bale from the back of my storage shelf, I saw the set of three rustic metal stars that I picked up at a craft store, and I used one in my photo shoot. I thought it looked nice hanging on the "barn" wall. Here's my secret: those three stars shed rusty pieces like crazy. Here's residual bits in the plastic bag that I store the stars in.

And the pack that I didn't buy? It's this one:

The flowered print on the right side of the dress looked very dull in the store. The elastic around the neck of the denim shirt was already folded over a bit, and I was afraid that the neckline would fold worse on a doll body. Plus, I had forgotten that the black polkadot piece was shorts and not a skirt. The fact that the purse doesn't look well with either of the outfits is just a plus. Or, a minus.

Autumn is coming soon here, which means farm visits, for pumpkins and apple cider and corn mazes and hay rides! Do you like visiting farms? Do you live on a farm? (I think I know at least one reader does.)

Mattel Wild Hearts Crew Cori Cruize Doll Review

I finally found another doll besides Jacy Masters at my local Walmart. At first, I had just been thinking about grabbing Jacy, even though I wasn't particularly fond of her outfit. But then I saw someone post on Instagram that Jacy was not a rebody candidate, as her neck is noticeably thicker than even the Curvy Barbie necks, so I decided to wait, in case I did choose to rebody.

There were still only three of the dolls available at my Walmart last week. Apparently, available in early July means "If you're lucky, you'll find some at your Walmart, and if not you can pre-order and get it whenever." I really liked Charlie Lake the best, from the pictures, but I didn't want to wait forever to get this review done, as other people have managed to get their hands on several of these dolls and reviewed them already.

According to Mattel's website, Cori Cruize is a musician, who creates her own songs. However, her full paragraph description is actually Charlie Lake's. You can absolutely see the care Mattel took with this new line. Anyway, you can tell Cori is a musician, because she has a Walkman. No, really, it looks like an actual old school tape cassette. Isn't she just so cool and rad?

Part of Cori's hair is done in cornrows, which are really hard to see from most positions.

Underneath her jacket, Cori wears a sleeveless unitard. Her accessories include earrings, a necklace, a belt, shoes and her cassette player. Her given motif is flames, which are on many of the items that come with her.

I know many of you were interested in her body type, so let's get into that. It appears that there are at least a couple of different body types in this new line, but as I said, finding all these dolls was impossible, and I wouldn't want to buy them all anyway. They all are decently articulated, having bending elbows and knees, as well as the usual shoulder, hip and neck movement that standard Barbies have nowadays.

Cori definitely has a fuller figure than the Made to Move dolls. However, she has a much thinner waist, proportionately, than the Curvy crew. I didn't get exact numbers, but Cori's bust, waist and hips are all smaller than Curvy's measurements.

The other big question is often clothes swapping. After all, our girls can always use more clothes, right, even if they get "stolen" from another doll? Sadly, none of the different variations I tried were very successful. I couldn't even get Cori's unitard past Curvy's thighs. However, even though Made to Move is slimmer proportioned, the unitard didn't work for her either. It didn't close in the back, and her torso is slightly longer, so that the unitard pulled up rather awkwardly.

I decided to try a Curvy dress on Cori, and although it looked acceptable from the front, where it hit on Cori's backside was rather... unfortunate. I imagine a tee and an elastic-waist skirt might work better.

I decided to try clothes on Cori that fit my older Barbie dolls, since they had larger busts and hips than some of the current Barbies. Yes, the dotted skirt is from a Made to Move doll, but it is currently being worn by a Fashion Fever Teresa, so it works for older Barbies too. For Cori, not so much. The blouse technically fits, except for being very loose at the shoulders at the back. The skirt went over her hips, but wouldn't close completely.

Lastly, Mattel made Cori's feet a completely new type, because what else does Mattel do? I was hoping the feet would at least be similar to a Curvy body with arched feet, and while the Curvy shoe does mostly fit, Cori's foot is slightly longer.

Since I still have Mattel's Ginny Weasley outfit lying around, I tried one of her shoes on Cory, and it does slide on completely, but was a bit loose, and the arch is not the same.

I have quite a few thoughts on this doll, compared to previous Mattel lines, but first I would like to ask if you now feel some of Mattel's other recent dolls are overpriced, considering this doll sells for only $14.97 at Walmart. Yes, she doesn't have articulated ankles and wrists, but she does have more accessories than you get with many standard Barbies. And how much of a mark-up should wrists and ankles be, anyway? Maybe I'm off base about this.

This new line is touted as being the next in the Monster High/Ever After High mode. One article says the dolls are "offering a new bridge between kids, tweens, and adult collectors alike." Hmm. Didn't know Mattel acknowledged that adult purchasers mattered at all for playline. Anyway, I don't even like Monster High, but I call absolute nonsense on the WHC being successors. For one thing, Monster High had an engaging storyline with the dolls right from the start: they were different from the world around them, because they were monsters. They turned into bats or were sewn together or had lupine characteristics. I don't remember any monster dolls being available in the playline market before. The WHC girls are different because: Mattel tells us so. They wear their hearts on their sleeves! They're into music and photography and skating and dreaming! HashtagDaretobeDifferent!

I'll admit that I'm cynical. I'm old enough that I've seen cycle after cycle of "it's okay to be different/be yourself even if you're different" messages aimed at kids roll around, not that I disagree with the sentiment. As I've pointed out up above, MH dolls really were quite different to the playline doll scene. And my beloved Ever After High did at least offer a new take on fairy tales, with the children of fairy tale characters. I mean, that's been done for ages in literature and movies, but not very much in doll lines. Plus, even though there were plot holes galore, the idea of whether or not the EAH characters should follow their parents' tales, or not, made for a storyline with a little appeal to  it.

Also, I personally liked the MH/EAH clothes a lot better than these new outfits. At least at the beginning of their respective launches, those outfits had more details, and painted accessories. Of course, they were more money, but all of a sudden, everything you got in those doesn't look so bad price-wise. Weren't they close to $20 US?

The doll line I would compare the WHC to, is My Scene. They were "edgier" than your standard Barbie. They had bigger heads. They wore more contemporary clothes. They had slightly fleshed out interests. Fifteen years from now, some doll company will probably produce a whole new line of doll friends that are completely different to these, and yet exactly the same. I guess I shouldn't be too negative about this; it's hard to make a group of dolls that absolutely stand out from any dolls made before. I think that I'm just reacting to the hype around these dolls, and maybe it's also related to the fact that I am that much farther away from the "just setting out to find yourself" stage in life than I was when my kids were into My Scene.

Some of my underwhelming feel for these dolls, though, I lay at the feet of Mattel. The WHC base outfits do not have the care and detail of My Scene, Monster High or Ever After High. The individual outfit packs, from what I've seen, are even worse. *One* item of clothing, a couple of small accessories, shoes that are recolored versions of existing ones, and some temporary tattoos for you and your doll. Hard to see tweens or adults getting excited about those.

I have seen people on Instagram excited about this line, and lucky you if you like it, I guess. They are something new from Barbie after Barbie after Barbie, or even release after release of Disney Princesses. But this group doesn't have a lot to draw this adult collector in, right from the start. It just feels like another gimmick line that will be discontinued in five years or less.

What do you think? Do you like them? Will you buy some? Were you only interested in taking their stuff for other dolls? Are they comparable to past dolls? Since I'm not interested in Cori as a rebody candidate, I'm going to try to sell her here for $7.00 to recoup some of my expense. Without her box, I can probably ship her in the continental US cheaply enough that she'll be close to the $14.97 plus tax that you would pay at Walmart. If you're outside the US and want her badly enough to pay for the higher shipping costs, let me know. I hope you enjoyed this review!

Asian Lantern Festival at Cleveland Zoo, with Asian Babysitting Skipper

My daughter The Dancer usually works on Sundays, but since she had off, I suggested that we go to the Asian Lantern Festival currently on at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, as we both wanted to check it out. A mutual friend of Mr. BTEG and the Dancer also joined us.

There were so many incredibly beautiful scenes set up, and we had a great time. Fortunately for us the weather was bearable, because we walked around the zoo twice, once during daylight, and once after the sun had set. For anybody familiar with the Cleveland Zoo, we didn't walk around the whole zoo, as a good bit of it was shut down, including the Australian Adventure section. I would have loved sharing pictures with my Aussie readers. :) Of course, we didn't have much time for extensive picture taking. We were at the zoo over three hours as it was, although we did see a show between our two walks, and also took a breather a couple of times.

I didn't take a lot of pictures with my doll, now named Mingmei. There weren't a lot of places to get her into the picture in an interactive way, since the lanterns were usually well behind fences. Also, as I said, I was with two other people, so I didn't want to take forever setting up shots. The Dancer did hold Mingmei for me while I took pictures. Here are the shots that I took. There will be more shots from the event, without Mingmei, below the fold, if you are interested. And although this event was called the Asian Lantern Festival, everything there was focused on Chinese culture and history.

In front of a parasol, which was one of several. I got a good shot of some other ones from the set-up at night, below the fold. I want to make a blog header out of this, but Google is not letting me at the moment.

A goldfish and bubbles. According to a sign, goldfish are symbols of wealth and prosperity in China.

Narcissus flowers.

A blue ball. There was also a pink one, and they both looked like giant Christmas ornament balls.

By the beautiful archway that stood at the entrance/exit of the zoo.

Surprise Travel Doll!

Today I got a box in the mail from my sister. She's been helping my mom go through stuff in her house; my mom is healthy, but she is 83. Most of what was in the box was old school papers, but there was also a travel doll in her original box! Tam showed us several travel dolls on her blog, and now I get one out of the blue! Now that I'm looking at the doll again, I do remember having her when I was a little girl. Unfortunately, I can't remember where she came from. Let's take a look at her.

Here she is in her box. The box is beaten up, but mostly intact, and the cellophane or plastic on the cover is still there. Judging by my beautiful handwriting, I must have received her when I was maybe seven or eight at the most?

Her head, torso and arms are made of lightweight plastic; her legs and feet are made of rubber. Her shoulders and hips allow her to move her arms and legs forward and backwards, and her head can turn left and right. She does open her sleep eyes, but I'm not sure they open all the way. Something rattles a little inside her head when you shake her; maybe it is the sleep eye mechanism. I love the shape of her little hands.

She wears a white cap, a white rectangular neckpiece, a red and black garment that looks like a shawl, but is also the only thing covering her torso, an apron, a skirt, an underskirt, simple underpants, and rubber shoes. Her underskirt is held on by virtue of being attached to a string that ties around her waist. I think her hair is probably mohair.

The mark on her underskirt looks like it was possibly some sort of mark by the manufacturer? It feels like it is painted on. Is it possible it was paper that changed over her many decades? It also looks like her underskirt was either sewn oddly, or is inside out, as the raw edge of the hem is on the outside of the skirt as she wears it. I don't remember ever taking her clothes off, but her underskirt could have fallen off and been put back on at some point, I suppose.

She is about 5 5/8" tall, or 14 cm. That probably explains why the bottom of her shoes are marked 14M. Maybe there were larger and smaller dolls like this, making this doll the Medium size.

I only found one clue as to which country this doll is from, but it isn't completely helpful. On the underside of her apron, there is a tag which appears to read, Mele, Danmark.

So our little lady is probably Danish, but I'm not sure that I'm reading the first word correctly, as it doesn't seem to mean anything applicable in Danish. I also tried looking up the word as Mels, but I got no results with that either.

I hope you like my little surprise dolly! I also enjoyed going through my school papers. There were a couple of notes from teachers that shed a lot of insight on my personality, and a note from a kindergarten speech therapist concerned because I can't lift the tip of my tongue when I speak. Well, yes, because I'm tongue-tied. I wonder if my parents tried to do the exercises with me that the speech therapist recommended. To this day, I'm not always understandable with every word when I speak. Oh well!

Welcome to My Crib

I've been talking for a while about showing pictures of the craft/hobby area that I share with my husband and my youngest daughter, the Dancer, who still lives at home. I took advantage of the sunny day we had today, and the fact that my part of the room is about as organized as it might ever be, to finally get some shots.

The Dancer does not really have much set up in her area yet, but she just got her own table not that long ago. She previously had a little space kind of carved out of her father's table and mine, which used to be back to back. She paints gaming miniatures, as does her father, but she is also interested in cross-stitching. I hope to find more hobbies for her to pursue. :)

There is just enough room to get to the right side of the closet doors. The Dancer hangs a lot of her clothes up in here, since there is no closet where her bedroom is. On the left side of this closet, that is blocked by her table, hang all of her dance recital costumes. I just went through old photos and figured it out; she has 20 costumes from 5 recitals.

The white wire shelving unit is mine. The white three drawer unit on top has most of my scrapbook paper. There's a small tool box, and then the rest is doll clothes, doll accessories, and doll furniture that I need to either find a home for, or sand, paint and find a home for.

I couldn't get a good shot of my entire craft table, where you could see everything on it well. So here's the left side. Mr. BTEG splurged on a compressed wood table for me, that doesn't make my dolls' hair all static-y, among other benefits.

Here's the right side of my table. I've got a lot going on right now, and a few things that need put away. Some of the stuff you see on the table will be in future posts. The black drawer unit on wheels, that has the paper towels and other assorted things on it, is also mine. This used to be strictly for sewing, until I decided I needed it more for storing doll things. The two top drawers still have ribbon for trims in them.

Here's a picture taken a bit back, so that you can get an idea of what the whole table space looks like. The camper will probably be going to the doll display area in my bedroom, once it gets its redo. The blue box underneath the camper holds most of the dolls that I use for dioramas. They're all standing up in there.

Directly behind my table, is my tall shelving unit. Among the many things on these shelves are my Ever After High playset cases, doll furniture and accessories, craft supplies, and crafting books. The blue photo boxes hold Kelly, her friends and baby dolls, old style Stacie and friends dolls, and old style Skipper and friends dolls. Since I don't take out these dolls as often, I decided it was better to store them in an acid-free, cardboard box. A couple of the plastic storage boxes I had for these dolls got too plastic-y inside, if you know what I'm talking about. The door to the left of my shelf leads to the second bath on the second floor. It's the Dancer's bathroom, now that her sister has left home. There's another door from the bathroom going out to the hall, just outside the main craft room door, which is to the right of these shelves.

Here's Mr. BTEG's table. It sits at a right angle to mine; some of it was visible in the pictures of my table.

There's a portable heater under the table, which we'll need in the winter. This room sits over the garage, so the floor isn't as well insulated, plus the ceilings slant up to a high point, the room faces north, and the window is very large. You'll see the window at the end.

Mr. BTEG also has a shelf like mine. He does more than print 3D items and do miniature and 3D item painting. He keeps supplies for his multiple Arduino and Raspberry Pi computers here. He occasionally does soldering on electronics here. And there are a lot of tools.

And in the opposite corner on this wall, sits his 3D printer set-up. The large plastic boxes store rolls of filament that he uses to print.

Lastly, here's a complete view of the front window, which is front of my table. The curtains are somewhat insulative, so they'll mostly be closed when winter comes along. The top arch, however, would be very expensive to cover, because of its size. I've never found a really practical way to do it. Yep, the curtain rod sags. The curtains would be better on the type of rod that gets drilled into the wall on either side, but that kind of rod just hasn't happened.

I hope you enjoyed this look around our shared little area where the BTEG family pursues our individual interests. It's a boost to my productivity to have an area completely devoted to crafting and photography. I know Rachael is working on a craft room for herself, and Xanadu has a pretty organized space. What does everyone else do?