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.)


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.


White Dress with Blue Tunic and Forget-Me-Nots for September

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

Finally, another birthday dress! I want to fill in the months I never got around to this year as well, but for now I will start at the current date. September’s birth flower (one of them, at least) is the forget-me-not, and its birth stone (again, one of them) is sapphire, making it easy to pick the dress’ predominant color. Adding the necklace on top of it all was kind of gilding the lily, but oh well.

It is only September 4th, but I’m starting to think about October. Last year I did a month of Halloween costumes, and I had so much fun I’m thinking of doing another theme month. I could do another month of random costumes like I did last year, or I could do something more narrowly focused. For example, Brian suggested a month of famous witch costumes – the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch, Willow, the Grand High Witch, Minerva McGonagall and so on. If anyone else has any other ideas, leave a comment! I’ve got all month to think about it.


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…