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Lately I’ve been through some trying times between taxes, the fallout from the stroke that my church’s minister suffered, and preparing for the upcoming Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire.
Easter weekend fell during this time last year along with the 2014 Awesome Con DC. One year ago yesterday I decided to treat myself to a Saturday-only pass. I made my order on Good Friday. A few hours after I ordered my pass, I found out that the minister at my Unitarian Universalist church had suddenly suffered a stroke. It was completely out of the blue because she had been healthy up until that point. Since my Awesome Con DC pass was non-refundable, I ended up going through with attending that convention on the following day while fretting over what happened to the minister. The day after my attendance at Awesome Con DC was the annual Easter Sunday service, which went ahead with lay leaders but the news of the minister’s stroke had cast a total pall over that service.
Here is what happened since I last mentioned the minister’s stroke in this blog. The congregation initially decided wait and see how well the minister would recover. For the first few months after the stroke the church decided to have a combination of lay leaders, visiting ministers from other UU congregations, and other guest speakers fill in on Sunday mornings throughout the rest of the spring and the summer. The hope was that the minister would return to the pulpit in September. As time went on, it became apparent that the minister wasn’t going to recover by September so the congregation decided to hire a temporary interim caretaker minister. This minister was retired but decided to go back on active duty temporarily. The hope was that the minister would be recovered by late spring-early summer 2015 and be able to resume her duties.
There were some changes this year. Awesome Con DC is now being held in late May instead of Easter weekend. Easter was earlier this year so it already came and went. Then there is the drama of the minister and her stroke. While the minister was making great strides in her recovery, she still isn’t able to fully take on the duties that she took on prior to the stroke. On top of it, the interim caretaker minister had made it clear that he really wanted to go back into retirement by September. For the past few weeks there were a series of meetings where various members had the chance to voice their opinions on what the congregation should do about the minister situation. But then the minister decided to resign from her job. She said that she was told by her doctors and physical therapists that she had reached a plateau in her recovery and she’s not likely to make a full recovery soon. While I’m sad to see her go, I think her resignation is for the best. Now the congregation can hire a new interim minister for one year while making a search for a new settled minister. And the outgoing minister can now take her time to heal from her stroke without the pressure of any deadlines from the congregation.
Then there are some recent stresses of my own. I did the taxes once again but it was stressful because I still have to pay taxes on the alimony that I receive from my ex-husband and I’m barely making ends meet without the taxes. (The fact that prices have gone up over the past year or two hasn’t helped at all.) I also did something stupid. For several months I would toss mail (mostly junk mail) and other papers into this huge pile on the dining room table. Among the stuff I tossed into that mountain pile were donation receipts. By the time tax time came around again, I realized that I created my own problem because I dawdled on creating a separate folder for putting last year’s tax receipts in and keeping it in the file cabinet. So I did a massive decluttering, which meant that I started working on the taxes later than usual. I managed to get them done just in time for the 5 p.m. mail pick up at the local post office on April 15.
While I was working on the taxes, my congregation was hosting the homeless for a week as part of the interfaith Warm Nights program that has been going on in the county for many years. I volunteered to bring a loaf of Italian bread even though I ended up on the April 14 slot, which meant I had to interrupt the crunch time on finishing the taxes in order to buy and deliver the bread. Then I went back home and worked on the taxes some more.
As for the taxes, I did okay until I had to fill out IRS Form 8965 simply because I purchased health insurance on the open market under the Affordable Health Care Act. I’ve had no problems with following the instructions on the other IRS forms but 8965 was a total bitch because the instructions were so confusing. At one point, I had to stop and recheck Form 8965 because my calculations on the main 1040 form said that I owed the IRS an extra $700 for health insurance discrepancy fees! I discovered that I mistakenly filled out the wrong sections and I really owed the IRS $20 for health insurance discrepancy fees. I wasn’t the only one who had problems with correctly filling out Form 8965. But, thanks to that damned form, I didn’t finish with the federal taxes until it was after midnight on April 15 and I still hadn’t started the state tax form yet. I spent the bulk of the next day working on the state taxes (which was far less complicated than the federal taxes) and I managed to get that form in to the post office just two hours before the official 5 p.m. collection time.
On top of it, the Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire was on April 18 so I did some initial work on those comic book coasters that I was making for that event, switched to working on taxes until they were done, then switched back to preparing for the event once the taxes were in the mail.
But it all worked out. Yesterday was the Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire and the comic book coasters were a hit. I sold part of my inventory and I made some money at a street festival for a change. I’ve had the best response to my wares in years and I’m totally happy about it. Maybe I’m not washed up as an creative person after all.
What’s more, I learned of a potential opportunity through a friend of mine where I could make some extra money on the side. No, it’s not some crazy illegal ponzi scheme. It involves fixing old computers up and selling them to people for cheap prices. I can’t really elaborate any further at this time because I don’t know whether this opportunity is a sure thing or not. If it works then maybe I can finally make an effort to pay off my debts. But I’m being cautiously optimistic for now.
Things have gotten really dramatic at my Unitarian Universalist congregation just in time for Easter Sunday. On Good Friday (of all days!) I got this e-mail from the Church Administrator saying that the minister had suffered a stroke. It was the darndest thing too because she’s not that old and she always struck me as being in good health. She doesn’t smoke and I rarely see her drink any alcohol.
It just came from out of the blue when, soon after she arrived at the church office on Friday when she suddenly didn’t feel well then she lost feeling on the left side of her body. She called her husband then called an ambulance and ended up in the hospital with the doctors’ diagnosis of a stroke.
This morning I went to Easter Sunday service, which went on as scheduled because it was originally planned as an all-ages service with help from lay leaders and the Director of Religious Exploration. I got more news that the minister suffered something called a hemorrhagic stroke and she’s currently paralyzed on her left side. The doctors think she’ll make some recovery but it’s too soon to see whether she’ll sustain any permanent damage. In any case she’s going to be off the job for a few months at least.
It’s the latest in a whole spiral of bad news that has struck people around me. In the last couple of months I’ve had to hear that a fellow church member was brutally attacked in her own home by an intruder, my mother was sent to the hospital for both the flu and a urinary tract infection, the death of my old college housemate from ALS, and the death of a friend I knew only from an online forum from cancer. If that wasn’t enough I had to endure some hassle when an alimony check from my ex-husband bounced but that situation has since been fixed on his end.
At church this morning someone left tiny jars of something marked “modeling dough” (which looked and felt similar to Play-Dough). During Sunday service, which had the message of how Easter is a time of rebirth we were encouraged to take the modeling dough and sculpt something out of it then put it on a table in front of the Meeting House. After the service ended, I took a quick photo of my piece, where I tried my hand at sculpting an Easter Bunny’s face but resembled a mutant rabbit instead.
After service someone had put out a table full of construction paper, stickers, and magic markers and we were all encouraged to make cards for our ailing minister. Here’s my contribution where, using magic markers and stickers, I made something that was influenced by seeing cherry blossoms and magnolia trees in full bloom everywhere.
I wrote a quick note to the minister before I started drawing on the other side. Too bad the magic markers bled through the paper but it’s still readable (I hope).
This isn’t the first time I had to endure someone around me getting a stroke around Easter. Four years ago last month my mother-in-law suffered from a mild stroke then an even larger stroke that ultimately killed her. Easter happened to fall around the same time that year. I remember when we went to her funeral in Tempe then we returned to the same church two days later for Palm Sunday. I’m hoping that my minister doesn’t end up like my mother-in-law. I hope nothing else bad happens to me or to people around me because it gets to be a bit much for me at times.
I’ve just learned from one of my cousins that my mother has been released from the hospital. She had both the flu and a urinary tract infection. Apparently she got over the flu, which led to her quickly getting over the urinary tract infection as well.
I’m relieved about this. I wasn’t able to visit yesterday because I’m currently doing volunteer teaching on Sunday afternoons through my church. (I’m teaching English to the local immigrant population.) Today I didn’t go because I needed the time to continue preparing for the Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire this Saturday. I originally planned to visit her in the hospital tomorrow but, thanks to her release, I won’t have to make the trip and I can continue focusing on the Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire.
I am glad that my mother is okay for now. I am also glad that it stopped raining today and the weather has now turned into the warm spring day that’s typical for the Mid-Atlantic region this time of the year.
My mother is currently in the hospital battling both a urinary tract infection AND the flu. Her condition is so bad that all visitors have to put on a surgical mask that’s provided in a slot on the door before entering her room.
When I last visited her, it wasn’t good so I cut the visit short. I skipped yesterday so I could go to a funeral for my old college friend. Today I visited my mother again and what a difference two days later! At first she was asleep so I just sat down and surfed the Internet on my cell phone. She woke up about 15 minutes later when a nurse got there to check her blood pressure and saw that I was there.
This time it was a much better visit with her. She wasn’t harping on how I was doomed to failure in this life like she did the other day. She also seemed more alert.
During this visit one of my cousins also arrived so we all talked with each other. It was a much better visit.
Despite my mother’s improved health, she will still remain in the hospital for another few days since she still has the flu and urinary tract infection. The family is hoping that she won’t have to go back to rehab once she’s released but only time will tell.
The worst part about the visit is that it has been raining non-stop since this morning and it’s still raining as I’m typing this on a Saturday night.
I’m not doing a Throwback Thursday this week because I’m too swamped with other things going on in my life. I learned last night that my mother is back in the hospital. It’s been over a year since she last had to be hospitalized. I thought she was doing really well ever since the doctors had changed her diagnosis from neuropathy to multiple sclerosis and now she’s back to square one.
I visited my mother earlier this evening and found that she not only has a urinary tract infection (which she has dealt with in the past) but she also has the flu. I had to put on a disposable mask before I entered her room. She was extremely exhausted and was a bit on the woozy side. I had purchased a pack of sugar cookies shaped like Easter eggs and Easter Bunnies from a nearby Giant on the way to the hospital and she refused it. (I ended up bringing the cookies to the weekly meeting of my support group for people who are separated or divorced after I visited with my mother.)
She also began to harp on what kind of future I’m going to have without a husband. (I think she has this deep down fear that I will end up as a panhandling homeless person on the street. I tried to reassure her that I did okay in the divorce but she still harped on what my future will be. She has long had a pessimistic view of me ever since I was a kid. She said that I was a relatively easy kid to raise but that still didn’t stop her or my father from being extremely strict on me—even after I graduated from high school and college. I tried to keep my grades up in school, I got involved in a couple of activities where I made friends, and I tried to stay out of trouble but nothing I did made a difference with my parents until I got married 10 months after I finished college.) I had once established a boundary with her and she seemed to improve her attitude towards me until now.
Between her pessimism about my future and her seeming to be very woozy and very exhausted, I ended up cutting my visit short. I thought she needed more sleep and I really could tolerate only so much of my mother’s constant thinking the worst about me. I won’t be visiting tomorrow because I’m attending a funeral for my one-time college housemate, who passed away after a two-year battle with ALS. I’m also trying to get ready for the upcoming Greenbelt Mini-Maker Faire plus I’m currently involved in a project where I’m helping a friend out with unloading some excess computer equipment. If I can get the items sold, I’ll get a cut of the profits. On top of it, I’m still trying to unload my parents’ old stereo and it looks like I’m going to have to adjust the price again.
And then there’s the April 15 deadline for finishing up my income tax forms.
It’s just getting very emotionally draining to have people around me who are either dead or are suffering. In addition to my mother and my old college housemate, I also learned about the death of another friend who I only knew through a forum (I never met her in person) and a 95-year-old fellow church member—who had reached out to my then-husband and I numerous times in the past—suffered a home invasion and a brutal attack. (The WJLA Channel 7 website has a sketch of the suspect who attacked my friend currently posted here. He is still at large as of this writing.) I need to balance everything so I won’t get overwhelmed by it all.
My area is currently stuck in yet another Polar Vortex with no end in sight. On top of it, I’m going through another milestone for me. I am suffering from my first illness since my husband abruptly walked out on me on December 28, 2011. The good news is that it’s just a really bad chest cold but I’m going through this on my own with out having a sweet significant other around to encourage me to rest while assuring me that I will get better in a few days.
This whole thing happened out of the blue. The week before I had uploaded a batch of this week’s blog entries ahead of time for them to eventually go live. It’s a good thing I did it this way because there is no way I would’ve even have the energy to do those entries this week.
So while the first of those entries went live on Martin Luther King Day, I heard on the news about the impending arrival of another Polar Vortex. In the meantime I had a dismantled Christmas tree, a Mickey’s Clock Shop box, and a box of Christmas ornaments in the corner of my living room waiting to be put up in the attic. I had delayed doing so because of the arrival of the first Polar Vortex and I really didn’t want to deal with a very freezing attic. So I left them lying in the corner until MLK Day, when the temperature was in the 50’s. I decided to get the Christmas stuff up in the attic before the next Polar Vortex arrived and I did so.
As the day went on I felt a little congestion in one of my lungs and I thought it was because I had accidentally inhaled a dust particle while I was up in the attic and it had wedged its way into my lungs. I went to Target to pick up a couple of food items since a major snowstorm was in the forecast (I didn’t dare go to a regular grocery store because supermarkets in the Baltimore-Washington, DC area are notorious for being overcrowded and full of panicked shoppers the day before any forecasted snow). I felt the congestion in my lung as I went shopping but I was still fine.
It wasn’t until the following day I really felt sick complete with heavy coughing, achy muscles, and feeling very woozy. All this happened while it was snowing outside and the temperature had sunk as low as 15 degrees. I was so sick that I postponed my scheduled therapy session until Thursday. So I stayed indoors and suffered alone.
I didn’t venture outside again until Thursday when it was time for me to visit the therapist. I felt like Rip Van Winkle in that I submerged myself indoors when the weather was relatively normal for the area. By the time I emerged I saw that everything was covered in snow and it was so freaking cold outside that it seemed to make my cold feel worse. The really cool thing was that some of my neighbors had shoveled the sidewalk outside my home, which was fantastic because I felt way too sick to handle a snow shovel and do it myself.
Today is the first day that I’m starting to feel normal even though I spent half the night coughing. (I’m definitely going to buy myself some Vicks NyQuil just so I can actually get a full night’s sleep without coughing.) Over the last few days there were times when I just felt like giving up because I have reached so many low points over the past couple of years that it just felt like the end. The only reason why I didn’t do it and actively did what it took for me to get better is because I have so many people in my life who are rooting for me to move on from that crazy love triangle (consisting of me, my husband, and the mentally ill friend he ultimately left me for and abruptly married once the divorce was final). Besides, I have a feeling that if I simply gave up and allowed myself to go through the usual progression of chest cold to bronchitis to pneumonia to death, my ex-husband and his wife would be celebrating while singing this song.
My husband already succeeded with his effort to divorce me. I’ll be damned if I give him yet another victory at my expense. So I now know that I can take care of myself when I’m sick.
When I made this post earlier today dedicating Amy Winehouse’s “Tears Dry on Their Own” to two friends of mine who have recently split up as well as other former couples who are spending the first holidays apart, I had no idea that my husband and I would be in that group.
A few hours ago my husband dropped a bombshell on me saying that he wants a separation. I was shocked but now as I think back over my hip injury, my surgery, and his continuing bout of bronchitis, I now know that the stresses and strains have overwhelmed us. I’m now kicking myself for not taking a more proactive role in the stresses of our marriage but hindsight is always 20/20.
I’m hoping that this will be a temporary separating and we will be reconciled but I am trying to prepare myself for the worst. At the same time I’m still in physical therapy for my left hip that was operated on back in September plus there’s my mother’s ongoing illness with neuropathy. Right now my life is a total mess.
I’m now going to have to make a bigger effort to take my personal problems and challenges head-on. A few minutes ago I decided to temporarily close my Etsy shop because I know I’ll be too distracted to do much work on in regarding promotions. After this blog entry I will have another nine days of blog entries that I’ve already uploaded a few weeks ago and they will eventually go live. (They are mostly links to music videos that I like.) This will continue until January 6 (the second anniversary of this blog). After that, I may update this blog depending on what’s happening in my life but I’m not going to be as active.
As for my Zazzle shop, it will still be up since I don’t directly handle the fulfillment of that site. But I won’t be adding anything new to the shop for a while.
The woman I know from my congregation whom I wrote about a few days ago has finally e-mailed her parents. She has survived the earthquake and tsumani and, so far, she’s not radioactive. I checked on her parents’ Facebook page and it seems like she is going to stay put in Northern Japan and help the locals there with the relief effort for the time being.
And speaking of Japan, I read in yesterday’s Washington Post that the organizers of the National Cherry Blossom Festival are going to go through with its plan to hold events starting later this month. So far none of the scheduled Japanese acts have cancelled so it looks like everything is going to happen as scheduled. But the festival itself will be turned into a fundraiser to the Red Cross and other organizations who are currently helping with the relief effort in Japan. In fact, the National Cherry Blossom Festival is currently running an online auction where part of the proceeds will go to the relief effort.
And speaking of cherry blossoms, I’m starting to see the blooms in some of the cherry blossom trees in my area. The trees are currently in a half-blooming and half-budding phase.
As for myself, there are some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I’m getting over my head cold pretty well. I’m still blowing my nose every now and then and I cough up the occasional phlegm but it’s nowhere near as bad as before.
Now for the bad news. My left leg that I injured in two falls has gotten a little bit better but it was falling into a pattern where on a sunny day it would feel better but if it threatened rain, it would feel worse. Last night I really felt bummed as it rained outside and my left leg had seemed to fall into a relapse. It has been going on since my second fall in Annapolis three weeks ago. (To recap: I fell for the first time during last month’s trip to Florida. I would feel stiff whenever I got up and took the first few steps until the stiffness worked itself out and I could walk normally. This lasted a week and I was fully healed. When I was in Annapolis on the one-week anniversary of that first fall, I fell for the second time. That second fall undid the all the healing, I felt even more stiff and sore than the first time, and this new injury has been very slow to recover.)
Today I ended up seeing a doctor and he prescribed some painkillers that are working way better than the ibuprofen that I had been taking. Tomorrow I’m going to have some x-rays done since the injury is in the same general area as where I had the hip replacement and the doctor wants to make sure that my metal hip isn’t screwed up. If everything goes well, I’ll see the doctor again next week for a follow-up visit.
I want to get better soon because my husband’s family is making plans to celebrate my father-in-law’s 80th birthday in New York City in a few weeks plus I’m getting all kinds of invitations to sell my arts and crafts at various street festivals. It would really suck if something really bad happened to my left hip.
Ever since Super Bowl Sunday, it’s been one thing after the other regarding my health. First there was the nasty stomach flu that started the same day as the Super Bowl and it didn’t go away until the day before I was supposed to pack for the Florida trip. Once I was in Florida, I tripped when I missed a bottom step leading to a bar in the hotel lobby and I landed on my behind. I spent the rest of the trip limping. By the time I got home, I was over the pulled muscles only to trip again when I was in Annapolis. That time I landed on my knees but that second fall had fully undone the recovery I was making. It has taken longer for me to get over this last fall than the first one.
I’m mostly over the pulled muscles in my left hip—with two exceptions. If I go in a car, I have to slowly ease my left leg in the car. Once I’m fully inside, I’m fine. But when I get out of the car, I have to slowly ease my left leg out of the car. Once I’m fully out, I tend to limp severely for the first few steps but, once my legs are warmed up, I can walk normally with a cane.
I also have problems if I sit down for a while. When I get up, I tend to limp severly for the first few steps but, once my legs are warmed up, I can walk normally with a cane.
In both instances, if I try to walk without a cane, I tend to waddle like a penguin. But I’ve been doing short spurts of walking without the cane in order to build my body up enough so I can ditch the cane.
If I hadn’t had that second fall in Annapolis two weeks ago, I would’ve been long since healed from that first fall in Florida. I had mostly recovered a week after the first fall when I fell again. It has been much slower recovering from the second fall than from the first fall and it’s frustrating.
If all that wasn’t enough, I have caught a nasty head cold a couple of days ago so I’m now coughing and sneezing. I tend to spend my free time sleeping, reading, watching television, or playing a game on my iPod Touch. Today it’s been raining buckets outside, which has only exasperated my cold. I have no other choice than to just go along with this latest setback to my health and hope I get better as soon as possible.
The worst of the stomach flu that caught me by surprise on Superbowl Sunday faded by Tuesday but I was left physically weak for the next few days. I took frequent naps while still dealing with a diminished appetite. (The only upside is that I had lost a few pounds that I needed to lose anyway.) I’m pretty much over most of the flu. <knock wood!>
Before I got so sick I took some of the money my mother gave me for Christmas and took her advice of treating myself to something special. I was perusing the Internet when I found this really cute little demon doll named Tong Tong on this Chinese site called 5Star Doll. Call me demented but I think the idea of a demon doll is pretty awesome.
I have this tendency to be drawn to dark and/or off-beat stuff. If I was to psychoanalyze myself, I would blame this attraction on my Roman Catholic childhood and how that faith expected girls to be pure in every way, including being even pure of thought. I also had a Catholic grandmother who really wanted me to be a nun but, well, I didn’t. (She was already dead when I got married so I didn’t have to deal with her being disappointed in my decision of choosing marriage over a lifetime of celibate clergy.)
So I reacted to that childhood by reading horror novels by Stephen King, watching movies like The Exorcist and The Omen (the original 1974 version, not that widely panned remake that was out a few years ago), reading vampire novels by Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, listening to rock music by bands with names like Black Sabbath, and reading all of the Harry Potter books. And I now have a demon doll because I decided to purchase her after learning that she was being sold through Denver Doll Emporium and I didn’t have to wait for overseas shipping since she’s already here in the U.S.
I ordered a doll that already had a faceup (I could’ve ordered a blank doll for a little less but I wasn’t really in the mood to do any doll facepainting) and had some default eyes aready installed. I ordered a doll wig because I thought she would have a bald head. It wasn’t until after she arrived that I learned that the doll did come with a wig and I didn’t need to order one separately. So the doll now has one short red wig and one blonde pigtailed wig and she looks cute in both wigs.
The doll also came with a pair of really cute shoes. And I took one look at the default eyes already installed and I really liked the pretty purple eye color so I’m going to keep the eyes as is and not bother with ordering a separate set of eyes. (I know from personal experience that installing eyes in small dolls can be a total pain in the butt.)
The coolest parts about the doll are that she has horns and cat-like paws for hands. The horns attach to the head with magnets so if I want to change wigs, all I have to do is remove the horns, change the wigs, and replace the horns. In addition, there’s a storage compartment inside her head that included a separate set of human hands. If I ever wanted to make that doll into a normal girl, all I have to do is remove the horns, replace the cat-like paws with human hands, and store the extra parts in her head.
The doll arrived while I was recuperating from the flu and it was a spirit lifter for me. The only thing missing in an otherwise perfect doll was clothes. She arrived totally nude. I knew that she was around 12 inches so I figured that she would fit Barbie clothes. Except I discovered that her body was thicker than Barbie’s and I couldn’t use the option of dressing her in cheap Barbie clothes.
I wanted to put this doll in something but there aren’t really any doll shops in my area and I had an upcoming trip to Florida so spending $25 or more on a high-end doll outfit from a website right before a trip was out of the question for me. The main alternative was to make my own doll clothes but I really didn’t want to spend the time dealing with patterns and sewing because I was still recuperating from the flu.
So I combed the Internet until I found this free tutorial from Doll Reader magazine’s website on how to make a dress without a pattern using a handkerchief. I went to this Jo-Ann’s Fabrics & Crafts that is located just three miles from my home and I found this really cute quarter-square quilt fabric that’s red with white polka dots along with some cute metal heart-shaped buttons, velcro, and some lace. Taking a tip from Tina Casey’s book Fabulous Fashion Doll Clothing You Can Make, I decided to use a hot glue gun instead of a needle and thread in order to save time on sewing.
When I finished making the dress in a couple of hours and tried it on the doll, I was happy that it fit her. The only downside is that when I picked the polka-dot fabric, I didn’t consider the possibility that it would make the resulting dress look like something that a circus clown would wear. I thought I found buttons that were perfectly scaled to the doll but it looked big on the doll and it added to the circus clown-like dress. At least the doll was clothed, which was preferable to seeing her naked. (She is anatomically correct and has the body of a five-year-old girl so you could understand why I felt too uneasy to leave that doll naked for too long.) I’ll post a few photos of the doll wearing that outfit that I decided to name "Clown Couture" because it looked like it could be fashion design for clowns. Feel free to laugh, I won’t be mad. (Heck, I think seeing the doll wearing that dress makes me laugh.)
I was satisfied that the doll was clothed but I wanted to try something else that would make the doll look less clownish. Thumbing through Tina Casey’s book Fabulous Fashion Doll Clothing You Can Make, I found a dress that could be quickly made from socks without using a pattern and using a hot glue gun and some leftover lace from the last dress and some old zig-zag trim from a previous sewing project that I did a few years ago. So I used a really cute white sock with a pattern featuring multi-colored hears. I whipped up this dress in just a little over an hour. Here’s the same doll wearing the dress that I call "Rainbow Hearts" while wearing the short red wig.
Maybe it’s not the best work I’ve ever done, those two efforts marked the first time I created doll clothes since shortly before my hip replacement surgery in 2008.
While I was planning for this upcoming trip to the Space Coast area of Florida, I did a Google search of doll shops in that area and I found two potential shops I could check out in the hopes of finding some properly constructed outfits that would fit this doll. If I visit the stores and I don’t find what I could use or if I end up not finding the time to visit those stores, I’ll shop around for some doll clothes online when I return from Florida. Or I could make another outfit using patterns and sewing and take my time to do a proper job. At least I have two outfits for the time being to keep my doll clothed as a stop-gap measure until I can find/make find something more proper.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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