June Birthday Dress with Rose Lace and Red Underskirt with Pearls

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

My mom’s birthday is today, and if I didn’t do a June birthday dress, well…

June’s flower is the rose, and one of the birthstones is the pearl. It was hard deciding what color of rose to base it on, but in the end I did yellow, pink and white dresses pretty recently.

Sorry for the brief post, I’ve been looking at a computer a little too long today!

The total number of visits my site got between April 1 and 30th was 19,629. That makes Dani’s guess of 19,632 the closest! Congratulations Dani, pick your dress and your colors and let me know your decision!

March Birthday Dress with Daffodils and Aquamarine in Yellow and White

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

Somehow today’s dress is one of those dresses I finish and never want to see again. It’s certainly all those ruffles. Even I have my limits, you know.

Anyways, this is the birthday dress for March — happy belated birthday, March babies, and I’m sorry about how late it is. The birth flower is the daffodil, and the birth stone is aquamarine, both of which I botched but hey, it is colorful at least. It is more of a dress to wear in the lamb portion of March; from the comfortable vantage point of May, I forget that this dress might be a little cold for Ivy’s shoulders and ankles.

No one has guessed the right number yet, so go ahead and start round two here! A couple people have come extremely close, though. Honorable mention to Sarah for her astronomical guess. If I had 3,424 Prismacolors, I would probably want to insure them…

Question: How many Prismacolor pencils do I own as of May 18th?
This includes the ones that I use, all the stubby little pencils that are too short for my current sharpener but I just can’t toss, all the ones I have in reserve and my set of Verithin pencils I hardly ever use.

Just to restate the rules:
1) It’s a new year, so even if you’ve already won one, feel free to guess again.
2) One guess per person per post.
3) If no one gets the exact number by noon EST, May 25th, I’ll pick the closest guess. (Why, oh why, did I make it a whole week long? Oh well.)

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

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

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.

Birthday Dress for October in Orange and White with Marigolds and Fire Opals

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

You poor October birthday people… I was really hoping to avoid orange, because orange is so overplayed for October, what with the changing fall colors and Halloween, but then it turns out your birthflower is the marigold. So I couldn’t avoid orange in the end, but I hope you like it anyways. Even if it’s immodest for me to say so, I really do! It’s simple, but it’s my favorite of all the month dresses I’ve done so far. Of course, since I haven’t covered all the months yet that’s not quite saying much, but in November I think my project will be to catch up…

Tomorrow starts day 1 of the Lord of the Rings Halloween costume series. I’m also going to be putting up a poll for what I should draw for week 2, so if you have any ideas, please post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the poll.

Green Dress with White Tunic and Daisies for April

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So I did a birthday dress for January and then proceeded to ignore February and March — I’m very sorry, anyone with birthdays in those months who was waiting for one. (I’ll do them this month, since belated birthday presents are better than nothing, right?) This is a dress for April, since one of the birth flowers for this month is the daisy. Like January’s, it’s intended to be vaguely angelic, but not based in any particular theology — I think of the birthday dresses as like those little statues you can buy for a kid every year where the characters get older, actually.

January’s drives me crazy, because the white part on the red skirt, there were supposed to be flowers in there, and I got fed up with the dress and it was late and I never drew them in. Maybe I’ll dig it out of my box and put them in, then it won’t bug me… This one I like a lot, though, so that makes up for many failures.

Yeah, no April Fool’s joke for you this year, sorry. Maybe next year!

January Birthday Dress with Garnets and White Carnations from Liana's Paper Doll Boutique

Click for the doll.

This is one of the “birthday dresses” I did for the Boutique that I referred to earlier — even if it’s ten years old I like this one better than the one I did this year. Well, maybe I’ll just try again next January.

So, I have a lovely design for the dress I intended to do today, and then my pencil sharpener died. Poor thing, I probably did put it through its paces… Come back tomorrow for something pretty!

January 2009's Gown with Snowdrop Embroidery and Garnets

Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

So one of the things I did with the Boutique was to draw dresses with the birthstone and flower associated with each month. Since that was fun, I’m going to give it a shot this year, too, so here is January with snowdrop embroidery and garnets. The design is intended to be vaguely angelic, but I don’t really like how it turned out… I guess I have 11 more tries this year.

Take the poll…