Retro Yellow and Black Ms. Pac-Man Dress with Fruit Pattern and Pink Bow

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

My beloved husband Brian requested a dress based on Ms. Pac-Man, and because I so often dismiss his ideas for paper doll outfits in a rather cursory fashion (and you would too, if you heard them) I thought it would be nice to indulge him a little.

We used to spend a lot of time at an arcade called Pinball Pete’s, back when we were in college and I lived on that side of Ann Arbor. Brian was pretty good at Ms. Pac-Man, and I liked to watch him escape the little ghosts. He was awfully cute when he wasn’t quite fast enough and got caught! He doesn’t play much anymore, now that we are stolid and serious adults (well, really rather that we live on the other side of town now), but you still can’t bring it up without him mentioning that the pretzel is counted as a fruit in Ms. Pac-Man. So of course, the pretzel duly makes its appearance in my dress.

For some reason I felt a sort of retro, fake-50’s feel would suit the theme, but now that the dress is done and I have no intention whatsoever of starting over, I wonder if perhaps an 80’s theme would have been better? Pretzel-covered leg-warmers? … Yeah, maybe not.

No one has quite won the contest yet… Just be glad I didn’t ask for the year, too!
What day is my wedding anniversary?
Post your guess in the comments! Again, the rules:
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per day.
3) If no one gets the exact date by 9:00 PM EST, June 9th, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.
– Yesterday’s hint: It was in the summer.
- Today’s hint: The day is an odd number.

Villager’s Cape with Black Turtleneck and White Pants from The Prisoner

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Lately, my husband, one of our friends and I have been watching The Prisoner, a famous 60s TV series starring Patrick McGoohan as a high-ranking British spy who resigns for unknown reasons and is kidnapped and taken to the Village, where he is known only as Number 6. The Village is like a resort where others in his position — those who knew too much, from both sides of the Cold War — live out their days peacefully, playing chess and sunning themselves on the beach, but only after revealing whatever information in their heads landed them in the Village in the first place. Although escape from the Village seems impossible, Number 6 is determined not just to get away or to keep his secrets from his captors, but to bring down the whole system.

The Village itself is cheerfully surreal, and its inhabitants wear things like these cute little capes as they noodle around the parks, shop for Village-brand staple foods or hatch escape plans that are doomed to failure from the start. Now let’s face it, if I was trapped in the Village, I would probably never escape; there’s a reason it’s called “Spy v.s. Spy” and not “Spy v.s. Paperdoll Artist.” I like to think that I would at least try, though, and one thing I can tell you is that I would be bringing one of those neat Villager capes with me as a souvenir. Well, Ivy gets one even if I don’t, leaving me to wonder just what exactly she got taken there for, and how well she’s been guarding that information from her captors…

My husband wants me to inform you all of two things: first, to shun the recent remake, and second, to watch the original online; A&E has six episodes up at the moment. Enjoy!

May Birthday Dress in Green and White with Emerald Brooch and Lilies of the Valley

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Now all of you born in different months are going to have some words for me, aren’t you? Or maybe some words with me. I don’t know which preposition makes it sound more severe. Well, green is a calming color, right? Look at the pretty green leaves, and the way the chartreuse fades into white on the edges of the fabric (a little more apparent in the original, sadly), and the wispy scroll pattern on the middle green layer. Don’t look, for my sake, at the long gap between this dress and the last one, or the missing blogroll that I never quite got around to putting back up after a server change, or the embarrassing state of my e-mail inbox, or all the increasingly heartwrenching comments on the last post. Green, right? Ooh, green.

Anyways, this is, of course, the May birthday dress… The May birthstone is emerald and the birth flower is lily of the valley, so I couldn’t resist. Plus, I guess I wanted to make something fairly ridiculous, since it’s been a while. I like to remind myself I haven’t forgotten how to use my colored pencils…

I took down the poll, because just thinking about it made me feel like a failure and a disappointment, both of which increase the odds that I’ll let the site go for another three months. I think I’ll probably be happier if I don’t revisit any of the things I never finished for a while. I’m sorry.

Hinata's Lavender Hoodie and Purple Pants from Naruto Shippuuden (with bonus Might Guy Green Jumpsuit)

Click for larger version (Hinata); Click for larger version (Might Guy); click for the list of dolls.

So I’ve been horribly sick lately, that is to say I got sick late January, had less than a week of health and then I caught something else altogether. That means I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with Naruto and the rest of the Konoha kids, because when I’m this sick I’m too stupid to follow anything more complicated. Naruto’s great for brainless times because it’s a Naruto law that you never see any important scene just once. If it’s good the first time, it’s even better in flashbacks! Plus, everyone is always announcing the names of their attacks beforehand, giving away their techniques and cunning plans and providing little chibi diagrams for the excitable seven-year old following along at home. If I was a ninja, things would be on a strictly need-to-know basis, but anyways if I was a ninja I’d be total fodder-nin (that is to say, dead before I was 15), so I guess you get the right to give away your secrets if you can back it up with power. Well, I kid because I love. Naruto’s kind of my Battlestar Galactica, which is to say Brian tolerates me talking about it with something akin to politeness, and he’ll never understand the joy of Shikamaru avenging Asuma’s death just as I don’t really understand the whole fracking Bob Dylan thing.

Anyways, I’m totally team Hinata, although I think Naruto will end up with Sakura because Kishimoto has this thing about the generations mirroring each other. Just look at the Sannin triangle between Orochimaru, Tsunade and Jiraiya, every bit of which has been replicated in the relationship between Sasuke, Sakura and Naruto. When history repeats itself like that there doesn’t seem to be any place in that triangle for sweet, loyal and sadly shy Hinata, only for annoying tsundere Sakura. Well, to heck with you Sakura, you don’t get a paperdoll dress even though I like your Shippuuden outfit better than Hinata’s hoodie. If it was up to me, Naruto and Hinata would wind up together, I actually like Sakura and Sai as a couple in the anime, and Shikamaru and Temari round out my Naruto ships. I wouldn’t mind Sasuke and Karin getting together if it’s the sort of tragic love that ends with Sasuke dying disgracefully in a ditch. Yep – I’m the sort of annoying Naruto fan who couldn’t care less about questions like “who would win in a fight, Guy with the sixth gate open or Gaara post-Shukaku?”

… yeah, if you seriously read all of that, you deserve a present, so here’s a bonus costume: the green jumpsuit that Might Guy and Rock Lee wear. The jumpsuit itself, according to Guy at least, is the perfect thing to wear in training, “a miracle gown for all youth,” so I can make it into a paperdoll for a girl with a happy heart. I drew it while I was sick, though, and I don’t like the way it turned out very much, so hey, bonus, enjoy.

Good news, bad news

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Hey, this is Brian.

So: there’s good news and there’s bad news.

So: what? There’s always good news. And always bad news.

But here we go:

Liana and I met about a decade ago. That’s a long story. You know 2001? This movie about time. Long story. Cave dude throws that bone up into the air — it spins — sunlight — cut to spaceship. Yes, the movie says, some deliberate, ordered sequence of events happened between the bone going up into the air and this spaceship out way beyond the bleeding edge of the sky. But none of that is important, now, since we’re watching this spaceship. And that’s sort of how the movie starts. People mark time. Birthdays, durations of video screen calls, all this garbage. And by the end, there’s all this weird kick the can stuff that makes you want to lie down in the wet popcorn dust on the theater floor and feel time and space and so forth kind of loop out, and then the guy is old, and he’s walking through these rooms, and then there’s this spacebaby. And that’s sort of how the movie ends.

The point being that I could go on for a long time about Liana, how we met, what a joy it’s been to have her companionship and sweetness and laughter since. But instead I’ll jump cut to the fact that, well, she’s gone.

I never had her pegged for the ninjitsu type. True, the warning signs were all there. But she’s up and left us. She didn’t write a note. Ninjas don’t write notes. Nor do they leave forwarding addresses, or even, apparently, lock the doors on their way out.

To the ninja, every door is unlocked. Locks are illusions. Doors are illusions, too. So it makes sense, from a certain perspective.

Hers, not mine.

So now you know the bad news. To wit: ninjas don’t draw paper dolls either. Paper shurikens, maybe. But then they cut them out with the force of a thousand burning eagles and — well.

Thinking about it, I’m glad I’m still alive. I was married to a ninja!

But I feel bad for all of you, who apparently derived some satisfaction from Liana’s paperdoll art.

And I feel bad for myself. Because, come on, I don’t know where she is. Maybe she’s under the fridge. Hiding in the cabinet. Hidden in the shadow of a table leg. Waiting to strike, with the force of a thousand burning eagle paper shuriken.

Hence I’m making the best of things, and I’ll be drawing some paperdoll costumes for you. That’s the good news.

Today’s doll is a celebration of Springtime in the Rust Belt. Frog legs for springing through the mud, a stupid hat for the usual reasons, and a sandwich board bedecked with the smiling sun, token of the King of Shadows and the elves, and also the only thing anybody drinks in this state between approx. March and September.

Happy spring. Also, send me your ninja evasion tips. I’m already doing all the usual stuff: garlic, wolfsbane, mousetraps.

Akatsuki Member's Cloak from Naruto

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I’m so far outside the targeted age group that it’s rather an embarrassment to admit, but I’m fond of Naruto. (Brian calls it the “screaming ninja children anime,” and he’s really right on the mark.)

This cloak is the uniform of Akatsuki, the group of powerful, outlawed ninja whose members become the primary antagonists in the later part of the series. Even if they are ruthless and pursuing world domination, they’ve got a little more fashion sense than most of the ninjas in Konoha (where most of the protagonists are from), where the hot styles of the day involve bulky olive vests and far too much fishnet.