Sewing American Girl Doll Clothes Is My New Mid-Life Crisis Hobby

One Facebook Story of my little niece holding her brand-new American Girl doll later, and my summer fate is sealed!

The art of sewing doll clothes is fairly new to me, but I always like to learn new things. And once upon a time I would also have told you that the sewing of tiny garments full of fussy, precise details did not appeal to me, but tbh I think that I, myself, am growing fussier as I age, because I kind of don't mind it now. So many precise 1/4" seams! So much tidy edge stitching! Such fussy cutting of novelty prints! I used to hurry through all my sewing to get to the finish as quickly as possible, more than ready to move on to the next exciting thing, but lately I've been pretty into the process, taking my time and focusing on the details and whiling away whole evenings puttering through a project while listening to endless audiobooks.

I just finished Endgame, which was a biography of Bobby Fisher, and now I'm ready for The Long Game, the last book in my hockey smut series!

There are several books of patterns for 18" dolls that I want to sew my way through, and first up is Doll Couture, a book that I actually own but never found the time to dive into when my own little American Girl doll enthusiasts were the right ages to have appreciated my work. Good thing I've got a new audience now!

This simple dress, a sleeveless bodice with a gathered skirt, is my first project:

Highly recommend owning an entire roll of tracing paper--it's so handy!

The instructions in this book are shockingly difficult to parse--they literally didn't tell me that the dress is supposed to come together like this--

--so at every stage I kept trying to sew the skirt into a circle, or stitch the bodice back closed, and once I thought I'd finally figured out what the step I was looking at said to do and ended up sewing the bodice shut at the bottom(?!?), but eventually my very own little Goodwill American Girl doll modeled a well-fitting dress for me:

I literally found her at Goodwill for eight dollars! I LOVE her! I think she's going to be my own personal version of the porch goose, and she's going to have SO many handmade outfits for all seasons and holidays. I need to fix her hair, though, so please send me all your best tips for untangling American Girl doll hair.

And then I sewed another!

I do really like all the tidy details involved, all the edge stitching and stitching down my seams and how nice everything looks when freshly ironed.

Oops, gotta trim that thread!

I experimented with a puffier skirt for the Halloween dress, and I find it much improved.

I really like how well-proportioned small-scale novelty prints look in an 18" doll's garment, and my plan is to use up as many of my novelty prints as possible sewing my niece a wardrobe of doll clothes for her birthday.

I've also been working hard to upgrade my photo set-up:

That's two softboxes plus a giant flexible vinyl panel from Menards that I clamp to my tabletop and sort of slither up the wall to make a seamless backdrop. Vinyl is such a bummer, but I love how it looks.

Now that I've finally cracked what the instructions wanted me to do, this dress is the simplest thing in the world to sew, and it turns out so cute every time. I even upgraded some bits, like fully lining the skirt and finishing the side seams, so mental note to make physical notes so I don't forget!

I considered appliqueing one of the gingerbreads from the skirt fabric onto the bodice, but I thought that it might look too baby-ish to the sophisticated eyes of its future six-year-old recipient. I kind of wish I'd done it anyway, though, because surely one can't have too many gingerbreads on one's outfit!

I had to make myself stop at two dresses for my niece's doll, though, because I have a lot of different patterns that I want to try. But it's surely not too late to sew just a couple of dresses for my own girls' childhood American Girl dolls, so carefully put away in the top of my closet (until I got them out to serve as extra fashion models for these photo shoots, ahem...). 

And of course my own little American Girl doll will need some outfits to wear when she's not helping me out with her fit checks of the garments I'm sewing!

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That Time You Saw Bigfoot Is Like That Time That I Definitely Met The Real Santa Claus

Bigfoot probably doesn't live in my woods, but anything is spooky when you photograph it in black and white!

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe the people who say that they saw Bigfoot, even though I also think that Bigfoot is not real. I get the cognitive dissonance of having an encounter completely unexplainable except by an impossible reason. This is the only thing that explains your encounter. And yet this thing is not real.

Because when I was twenty, I definitely met Santa Claus.

At the time, I was a Senior in college. Everyone I knew was a college student, a professor, or one of the few townies also into punk rock and also too young to get into the good clubs to hear our favorite bands play. I spent a lot of time loitering downtown outside of said clubs, in class, or at house parties.

I hit the books a LOT less than my own children do, but don’t tell them that. I work very hard on my “I want you to have fun at college, but remember that you’re there to study” face.

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One afternoon in early December, when I should have been studying for finals, my boyfriend and I instead found ourselves wandering around the local mall. I needed to buy Christmas presents, ideally for less than five bucks a person, and if some pretzel bites also happened to find their way into my possession, well then so be it. My boyfriend was keeping me company because hey, any excuse not to study!

The Santa Claus spot at this mall was set up like an ice castle, with the line snaking towards the castle and Santa himself inside it. There were open windows all around the castle so that you could look in and see the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, but I imagine that when you were inside it you felt sort of cozy and private and like you had Santa all to yourself.

As my boyfriend and I walked past, I peeped through one of the windows and saw that Santa was sitting there all alone, nobody on his lap, so I impulsively called out, “Hi, Santa!”

He looked up, smiled, and I swear he gave a jolly, “Well, hello, Julie!”

I don’t think I even replied or responded in any way, because my flabbers were too ghasted. My boyfriend heard our exchange, but he didn’t respond either, because he said later that he just assumed that random guy and I knew each other from somewhere and that’s why I’d called out to him in the first place. But Y’ALL. I did not know that old guy with the white whiskers sitting on Santa’s throne! None of my professors were at all Santa-like, and this college I went to was the kind of place where the professors weren’t moonlighting as Mall Santas. My college friends were very much college-aged, and my three or four local friends were around that age, as well, with the addition of lip piercings and neck tattoos, etc. I did not know a single other soul in the entirety of Texas.

I've told this story dozens of times, to friends and acquaintances, to kids who believe in Santa Claus and to kids who don't, and I always tell it about the same (occasionally leaving out the punk scene and or my lack of studiousness, depending on my audience), and I'm always all, "I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa."

Like, yes, I recognize that logically it wasn't Santa. Logically, the person wearing the Santa suit in that mall on that afternoon did randomly know my name, or he said something else and I just thought I heard my name. It obviously wasn't actually Santa, because Santa isn't real. But also: I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa.

So that's what I think a lot of these Bigfoot hunters are feeling. Logically, they know Bigfoot isn't real. But they have an encounter that is best explained by Bigfoot being real, so now they're all "I dunno, guys"ing around reddit and maybe going on the odd Bigfoot hunt and attending the occasional meet-up with other people who've had encounters best explained by Bigfoot being real. And then other Bigfoot hunters are more woo about it and have psychic links to Bigfoot and use crystals to communicate with it, etc.

And then other Bigfoot hunters… Honestly, based on O’Connor’s book, other Bigfoot hunters just seem like they want something where they can be right and everyone else is wrong, where they’ve got the truth that’s out there and everyone else is a sheeple. O’Connor compares them to Trumpers, which many of them already are, in an interesting and alarming and kind of obvious-when-you-really-think-about-it way.

Ultimately, I think that O’Connor did the work of writing an ethnography of the search for Bigfoot in a world in which Bigfoot is not real. It does mean that the book feels like a lot of… well… nothing, but that’s because ultimately, there’s nothing to tell. Bigfoot isn’t real, and the search for Bigfoot is just a bunch of people poking around the woods, finding out that Bigfoot isn’t real, and ignoring that in favor of continuing to wonder if maybe Bigfoot is real. I think O’Connor could have made the storytelling more dramatic, but likely only at the expense of the individuals who I think he was trying his best to treat respectfully. It reminds me of The Cold Vanish, in which the author has more dramatic stories to tell, but those stories often involve tearing apart some extremely vulnerable moments in the lives of vulnerable people, in ways in which he ought to be ashamed. This book, on the other hand, toyed with being boring, but nobody was victimized by the telling.

I think O’Connor’s most interesting and most important point is this:

“The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition.”

In O’Connor’s worldview--and mine!--everyone wants, or should want, a meaningful life. A life that understands, perhaps, its place in the world. A life, perhaps, that understands the world itself. Personally, I’d love it if the world and everything that happened in it made sense and had a greater purpose to it! It doesn’t, and I find my meaning elsewhere, in my husband and children, in the pursuit of knowledge, in writing and in creating, but I’d love it if it did. Is it those who cannot find their meaning elsewhere, and who cannot take comfort in the meaningful fiction of organized religion, who find it in conspiracy theories and tempting untruths like these? Are they the ones wearing Trump hats and protesting floridated water and insisting that Forrest Fenn’s treasure is still out there and searching for Bigfoot?

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That Time During the Great Depression That Canada Stole Five Identical Babies and Put Them in a Baby Zoo and Made Them Do Brand Deals

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The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WTF, Canada?!?

Just… every part of this story that comes after the children’s birth and first weeks--truly a miracle that the kids all survived without long-term complications!--is so messed up. The kids’ lives were the worst combination of overworked child actor and infant ape stolen from the wild and raised like a human for science. The way they were taken from their birth family, actively prevented from forming healthy sibling relationships (with their other siblings and with each other), raised with asylum standards by employees with a high turnover rate, and used for publicity stunts and brand deals and media attention is all so obviously wrong that I can’t imagine how anyone went along with it. And let’s be honest--the only way those kids managed to get out of that institution is because they, like sitcom child actors everywhere, grew up enough that they were no longer perceived as cute enough to stay kidnapped. And even then they had to leave the only home they’d ever known and go live with people who resented them and were jealous of them and abused them in a multitude of ways.

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Also just… the ABSOLUTE NERVE of the Canadian government and their official “guardians” to take custody away from the Dionne parents because they’d made a publicity deal with the Chicago World Fair--a publicity deal that they made to, you know, GET THE CHILDREN LIFESAVING MEDICAL CARE AND MONEY TO PAY THEIR BILLS--and then themselves go on to high-key expose those kids to publicity stunts and brand deals and advertising schemes for nearly a decade, all for money in everyone else’s pockets. The kids had to pretend to open Christmas presents months before Christmas so that the magazine layouts would be ready for the holidays. They were required to act in a movie years before they were allowed to sleep in their family home. They had to shill specific brands, and be in their doctor’s Christmas card photo with him instead of his own son.

What a bunch of assholes!

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The children’s upbringing really sets off the difference between surviving and thriving, and for whom. Sure, that early intervention is absolutely what allowed those babies to survive, but continuing it for months longer, then years longer than that emergency warranted may have been marketed as the best thing for the children’s continuing survival, but the only people thriving in that arrangement were those making money off the kids’ marketing deals and trust fund. Even if anyone involved in their care thought they were doing the best thing for them--which I’m pretty sure nobody really and truly thought that--sacrificing the children’s potential to thrive, to have big lives full of friends and family and experiences and normality, feels like too big a cost.

I found some of the old newsreels and footage of the kids (although I can’t find that movie they had to act in), and I guess we’re just more savvy about our reality television these days, because it’s obvious to me how often the kids look towards someone behind the camera to get instruction. That’s not even reality at that point--that’s an episode of Full House!

Random moments that horrified me:

• The nurses weren’t allowed to kiss the kids or show them physical affection, and their siblings were rarely allowed to visit and their parents weren’t left unsupervised with them. Was Canada TRYING to raise them as psychopaths?!? It’s a separate miracle that everyone managed to grow up as mentally healthy as they were able to. Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne are some of the most resilient human beings I’ve ever read about.
• People complained when they’d line up to watch the kids play in their custom-build playground that served as a panopticon/baby zoo and the kids didn’t look super cute like they did in the magazine photos, so the nurses had to dress them up and curl their hair before both their morning and afternoon yard time. And people would get pissed if they didn’t see all five kids or any of the kids were just moping around, so the kids had to go out even when they didn’t feel like it, and they had to “romp.”
• The trip to go meet the Royal Family when the kids were five was the first time they’d left their property since they’d been moved there as babies. Seriously, WHAT?!? No trips to the seaside or an amusement park or a zoo, much less to the hardware store or their parents’ farm or on a picnic? The kids had never even seen a cow before!!! How did anyone in charge of them think that would be good for their brains?
• When they tested the children while they were still institutionalized under Canadian guardianship, they discovered that the kids were developmentally behind, especially verbally because they’d lived in the same few rooms their entire lives and had nothing to ask questions about and nothing new to talk about, and physically because they never had to try anything new or develop independence.

Although I wish I’d been told more about the adult lives of Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne, I actually appreciated that I was not, because that’s clearly the better and more ethical choice. Those kids had their privacy stolen from them, and as adults they definitely deserved to be free from all the looky-loos who made their babyhood kid zoo so popular. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have burning questions that I didn’t try to Google on my own, ahem! But at least I had to do my own work for my gossip. I even Googled to see if anyone had ever found Cecile’s asshole son, Bertrand Langlois, who stole the rest of his elderly mother’s fortune and disappeared.

I hope you’re dead in a ditch somewhere, Bertrand!

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You Cannot Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Self-Insert Mary Sue Fanfiction as a Historical Document

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish by Barbara Boustead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To me, the hardest concept to grasp about the Little House on the Prairie books is that they’re fiction. And to be honest, that’s because they’re not completely fiction! But also, they are! Confusingly for fiction, the main characters all have the names of the author and her real family. Confusingly for non-fiction, the characters don’t adhere to the timeframe of the author’s life. But confusingly for fiction, they operate in a similar timeframe. The stories that are told most resemble fanfiction, i.e. the retelling of a canonical story in a different way to achieve a different effect or result. And because Wilder wrote them about herself, I guess they MOST most resemble self-insert fanfiction, although even that isn’t quite right because the canonical story IS about Wilder. Does Laura sometimes come off better in the stories than she did in real life? Then maybe she wrote self-insert Mary Sue fanfic. Or should we just ignore the self-insert part? Then maybe she wrote AU fanfic.

Or we could just admit that Wilder invented, and is nearly the only author within, a specific sub-genre that conflates memoir with fiction. The other authors within this genre are the ones who claimed they wrote memoirs but then got caught lying in them. It’s interesting that Wilder chose to overtly fictionalize her story rather than push her memoir forward, but of course that’s the fault of those who wouldn’t publish Pioneer Girl as-is. BUT it worked out for the best, because her Little House books are much stronger than Pioneer Girl. And so back we go to the scenario in which Wilder invents a new sub-genre of literature!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All this to say that I did find it problematic that Wilder Weather sometimes seems to conflate fact with fiction, or rather, doesn’t always overtly distinguish between the two when discussing the Little House books and/or Wilder’s actual life. There were absolutely some acknowledgments, but the awareness didn’t feel explicit on a case-by-case basis. An example that stuck out to me was the discussion of the scene in These Happy Golden Years in which Laura and Almanzo see a tornado. Boustead writes, “In These Happy Golden Years, Laura immediately notices the heat and humidity on Thursday, 28 August 1884 (not a Sunday as her book narrative would indicate).” That reads as a clear acknowledgment that the Little House books and Wilder’s life are not the same, but it doesn’t feel like an acknowledgment that Wilder did this on purpose, or that perhaps she simply made no effort to verify a specific date because it didn’t matter in her work of fiction--it just as easily reads as if Wilder made a mistake with her dates.

The day is important because this is the day of the tornado. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo and Laura are out riding in Manly’s buggy, when a storm begins to form in the distance:

“Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish-purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up,and reached again.
“How far away is that?” Laura asked.
“Ten miles, I’d say,” Almanzo replied.
It was coming toward them, from the northwest, as they sped toward the northeast. No horses, fast as they ran, could outrun the speed of those clouds. Green-purple, they rolled in the sky above the helpless prairie, and reached toward it playfully as a cat’s paw torments a mouse.
A second point came groping down, behind the first. Then another. All three reached and withdrew and reached again, down from the writhing clouds.”

Boustead notes about Almanzo’s estimate of the distance to the tornado that “[h]is memory was probably quite accurate; though Wilder tended to exaggerate distances in her books, Almanzo had a clearer sense of distance.”

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Here’s the thing, though: that version of the tornado anecdote is from the fiction book. The Almanzo who estimated the distance is a work of fiction, his placement in a buggy with Laura as they witness the tornado ten miles away is also a work of fiction. There’s no indication that the real Almanzo’s memory was consulted for this fictionalized anecdote, nor that the real Wilder’s authorial estimates of distance were “exaggerations” and not purposeful components of her descriptions of her fictional world.

Here’s the anecdote from Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s memoir:

“One afternoon we saw a bad storm rising in the northwest. It came up for awhile, then turned and swung around passing to the west of us going south. The large bank of clouds was first black, then turned a queer greenish, purple color and from it a funnel shaped cloud dropped down until its point touched the ground. With its point on the ground and the large end of the funnel in the cloud above it began whirling and traveled southward with the purple green cloud above it.
Then a second funnel point dropped, touched the ground and followed the first, then another and there were three under the cloud and traveling swiftly with it.
The wind was almost still where we were and we stood in the dooryard and watched the cloud and its funnels pass on the west of us.”

The memoir narrative is clearly describing the same tornado (there’s even a photo of what most academics assume to be the tornado being described--it was a famous tornado!), but in this narrative, which is intended to be factual, the “we” is likely referring to the Ingalls family, and they are at home, since they stood “in the dooryard” and watched the tornado pass to their west. Unless there is some kind of correspondence or interview notes that also support the factuality of the These Happy Golden Years anecdote, it feels like an odd choice to discuss the factual accuracy of minor details in the fictional account when there’s a fact-based account that could be discussed. It would have been super interesting to theorize whether or not that famous tornado’s path could have been seen from the doorway of the Ingalls’ homestead!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Boustead also mentions the floating door that merits a story of its own in These Happy Golden Years, noting that it “stretches credulity.” The door story is told a little more sedately in Pioneer Girl, but as hear-say, not witnessed by Pa and Almanzo as is told in the fiction book. Whenever there’s an exciting incident in the Little House books that doesn’t happen to Laura, I always wonder if that was a part that Rose Wilder Lane authored, since she was the sensationalist.

Also, the Pioneer Girl anecdote would have better supported Boustead’s claim that the tornado they saw was THE famous tornado, since it’s much more likely that the family would have been in their dooryard on a Thursday than that Laura and Almanzo would have been buggying about the plains on a Thursday. Laura and Almanzo courted on SUNDAYS!

Tangent, but when I went to look up the tornado anecdote in These Happy Golden Years, I saw that it was very near the end of the book, so I obviously sat down to keep reading, and omg the scenes in which Laura is preparing to leave her home and family to move in with Almanzo, feeling sad and nostalgic and homesick even though she hasn’t left yet, excited about what’s to come while mourning everything she’s leaving behind--well, I don’t know if you need to be putting those words in front of perimenopausal empty nesters, because I cried so many cries for a Tuesday afternoon! It was beautiful in a way that I absolutely did not appreciate until this read-through.

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All that being said, I was VERY interested in reading about all the historic weather events and patterns that occurred during Wilder’s life and that informed her books. It’s obvious from page one of Little House in the Big Woods that Wilder has a mind for detail and a knack for description, and it was fascinating to see how many famous weather events can be matched to their fiction counterparts just by description alone. It was also interesting to see points where the factual accounts didn’t match the fictional counterparts, and it made me wonder what other authorial purpose they were then serving, what Wilder might have wanted to convey differently. Why, for instance, would she have Laura and Almanzo witness that tornado from Almanzo’s buggy? Perhaps because, unlike in the previous books in which Laura is a child and her family comprise her other main characters, in this book she saw Almanzo as the other main character, so the most exciting events should happen in his company? Or perhaps because those Sunday buggy rides actually read as pretty boring, and this was a more exciting way to convey that the courtship is still happening?

I also thought that the discussion of the climate during Wilder’s time, both in itself and vs. our time, was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t have skipped reading this book for the world just for that info. It was heartbreaking to learn that those Dakota tree claims that gave the Wilder family such agony during their four-year homestead duration would never have worked… although Pa’s cottonwoods at his own homestead did survive. I’ve seen them!

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20 Hours in Ohio, and Free Doughnuts are a Lie

You do not have to work hard to convince me to take a trip with you, ESPECIALLY if you tell me that I can pick some of the stops.

So when the younger kid came to me with the information that the lead singer from her favorite band was going to be playing a concert in Columbus, Ohio--

--and she suggested that if we went, maybe I'd like to also do a little sightseeing along the way, she basically barely had time to put a period at the end of her sentence before I had concert tickets in my online shopping cart. 

And a couple of weeks later, there we were at this bar in Ohio!

Do you guys like to stand as close as possible at concerts, or are you calm and happy to stand at the back? I'm short, and I like to stand in the front so I can see, although a lifetime of this has definitely contributed to my current hearing loss and the front of the crowd, pressed against the stage, is the last place I'll want to be when the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits. Oh, well. I wasn't planning on surviving the zombie apocalypse, anyway...

Although Jake Ewald didn't play all the Slaughter Beach, Dog deep cuts that the kid had been hoping for, he did play one of their biggest hits, "Summer Windows"--

--so my own personal basic bitch self was satisfied:

I didn't know Ladybird before the concert, but this is my favorite song of theirs now:

The next morning, I picked our breakfast spot solely because of this TripAdvisor review that lauded the complementary DIY coffee bar and complementary serve-yourself doughnuts:



The DIY coffee bar was as indicated and was awesome, but y'all, the complementary serve-yourself doughnuts was a LIE!!!!! They did indeed have serve-yourself doughnuts, but you for sure had to pay for them. 

I think that TripAdvisor reviewer accidentally stole herself some doughnuts...

Ah, well. My doughnut-less but very en-coffeed breakfast was delicious:

Afterwards, I managed to snooker us into not one, but TWO sightseeing stops!

Obviously, if you're going to Ohio, you HAVE to visit an ancient Native American mound:

Shrum Mound is said to be an Adena burial mound--

--but as far as I can tell, it's never been excavated or even really researched, so I'm not sure how accurate that identification is. It's right next to a quarry, across the street from a housing development, and next door to another house, though, so probably its biggest claim to fame is that it wasn't destroyed the same way that whatever other earthworks were surely around it must have been. For example, there used to be a mound twice as tall at the intersection of Mound and High streets, but it was destroyed in the 1830s.

Here it is with me for scale!

Since it's roughly on our way home, I was also able to convince everyone to detour over to the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument:

The kids and I have been here before, but didn't realize until we got there that back then it was open "by appointment only," so this is the first time I've stepped foot inside!

There weren't a lot of artifacts inside, but the signage was VERY informative. I didn't even realize until this moment that I didn't actually know what a buffalo soldier was!

Charles Young's story is very interesting, and I'd love to read a more substantive biography of him. Apparently, his whole life, during his education and his career, he suffered from systematic, institutionalized racism, and he just... persisted!

He did incredibly well for himself, and worked consistently to lift others up with him, but who knows what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been beaten down at every opportunity?

Racism is so depressing. Let's eat an apple fritter about it:

Will we be able to complete the Butler County Donut Trail in a timely fashion, considering that most of our trips to Ohio are for college drop-offs and pick-ups? 

I don't know, but I'm fully prepared to get diabetes trying!

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