Pink bombshell

Hallelujah!

Barbie announced today the expansion of its Fashionistas® line with the addition of three new body types – tall, curvy and petite – and a variety of skin tones, hair styles and outfits. 
The new 2016 Barbie® Fashionistas® doll line includes four body types (the original and three new bodies), seven skin tones, 22 eye colors, 24 hairstyles, and countless on-trend fashions and accessories. Adding more diversity into the line continues the journey that Barbie started in 2015 when the brand added 23 dolls with new skin tones, hair colors and, most notably, a flat foot.

The 2016 Fashionistas® line will include:

• 33 new dolls
• 30 hair colors
• 24 hair styles
• 22 eye colors
• 14 face sculpts
• 7 skin tones
• 4 body types

The new dolls can be viewed on Barbie.com and will be available to order on Jan. 28, 2016 on Shop.Mattel.com in the U.S. The collection will be available starting in spring 2016 at major toy retailers worldwide.

Tees for two ... or more

Mini Me Dolly Divas

Clementine and I have hit the clothing jackpot!

Just look at what Momma got for us from Mini Me Dolly Divas!

You've seen the stunning Steampunk Star Trek outfit Dacia made me, but she added a "few" more T-shirts into the trade. 

Woo hoo!

Meanwhile we are trying to decide what to wear first. Any suggestions?

Bonus points if  you can name all the pop culture references in the T-shirts.

Feeling wicked

I can't help it, but the more I look at Ghoul's Alive Robecca, the more I want to set her up on a blind date with Barbie's Wizard of Oz Tin Man.

Snigger.

I wonder if Mattel will agree?

and that's when I snapped

Mini Me Dolly Divas

Thanks once again to Char at Doll Diaries, Momma and I have found a new Etsy store to adore: Mini Me Dolly Divas.

See? Even the store's name is perfect!

and that's when I snapped ... this just makes me smile. Perfect for any American girl photographer or a just for fun outfit.

• THE T-SHIRT - Jersey knit t-shirt machine embroidered, closes in the back with velcro.
• THE SKIRT - Mullet knit skirt that is longer in the back than in the front.
• THE HAIRBOW - Grosgrain ribbon on a plastic hair clip that will be safe for your doll's hair 

Some of my favorites?

• I make geek look chic
• and though she be but little, she is FIERCE.
• Step aside Barbie, there's a new doll in town.

I could easily start amassing a t-shirt collection and have made a couple of custom requests.

Mwa ha ha!

Dolly'll never go away again

As previously mentioned, Momma has never cared for blond, blue-eyed dolls.

Maybe it was because she was a brunette, brown-eyed girl.

Or maybe it was because of all of the blond, blue-eyed dolls on the market in the late '60s and early '70s when she was in her formative doll years.

Almost all the dolls she saw of that era were blue-eyed blondes - at least in the town she grew up in. Momma had Ideal's Velvet and Mia (she preferred the brunette Mia) and didn't even know there was an African American Chrissy until she was an adult.

She and her brother both collected Marx's "Best of the West" and her brother collected their "Noble Knights and Vikings" action figures. Momma had Jane, Janice, and Josie West, as well as Princess Wildflower, while her brother collected the males in both lines. (Momma would have liked to collect girls from the "Noble Knights and Vikings" but there was none.)

At the end of her doll-playing days (but not collecting!) she had Mattel's entire Sunshine Family and Happy Family lines - mostly because she liked the multicultural and multi-generational aspect of the dolls. (Mattel did not make a "Black" Barbie until 1980!)

But her biggest regret? Not keeping the two Barbies given to her by her older cousins.

Why? Her cousins are 6 to 12 years older than Momma and gave her two of the earliest Barbies when they outgrew them!

Sadly, Momma did not like what she now thinks was a 1961 Mattel Barbie Titian-Hair Bubble-Cut Barbie, and what was possibly the first 1959 Teenage Fashion Model Blonde Barbie.

Momma disliked them so much she dressed them in white slips (yes, they made dolls wear slips back then) and forced them into domestic servitude for her Mod and Malibu Barbies.

Snigger.

Let them steam cake

Lucid Junkie Designs

Happy birthday to me!

Look what Momma ordered for me from Lucid Junkie Designs.

Miniature steampunk inspired cake for Barbie, Monster High, or dolls of similar size. Three layer cake made from polymer clay, real watch parts, and other mix media. Cake measures just over three inches which includes the topper. Item is not recommended for children due to small parts. All pieces are attached to the cake and not removable.

Yum!

(Just a subtle reminder that my birthday is April 9!)

The Philadelphia Eleven

Today is an important date in the history of The Episcopal Church: 11 women were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood on July 29, 1974 in Philadelphia!

These ordinations, performed by retired or resigned bishops, were denounced as “irregular” and the women became known as the “Philadelphia Eleven.”

Charles V. Willie of Harvard University, who gave the sermon, favorably compared the ordinations to African Americans refusing to sit at the back of the bus. 

According to The Episcopal Church:

The 11 women who were ordained priests at the Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, on the feast of St. Mary and St. Martha, July 29, 1974, two years before General Convention authorized the ordination of women. The women ordained were Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeanette Piccard, Betty Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig. The bishops who presided at the service were Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, and Edward Welles II. These ordinations, and the ordinations of four more women in Sept. 1975 in Washington, D.C., were widely criticized as irregular because the Episcopal Church had not yet authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood. In 1976 the House of Bishops affirmed the validity of the ordinations by requiring of the 15 women only "an act of completion" that would be "a liturgical incorporation of what was done on those two occasions" in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. All of the "Philadelphia Eleven" participated in public events of "completion" within the following year, with the exception of Marie Moorefield who left the Episcopal Church to join the United Methodist Church.

Bishops Jefferts Schori (left) and Harris

Barbara Harris, a Philadelphia native who became the first woman bishop in 1989, participated in 1974 as a laywoman and bearer of the cross.

And finally, The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori was elected in 2006 as the first female Presiding Bishop in the history of The Episcopal Church and also the first female primate in the Anglican Communion.

Let's hear it for women breaking the stained-glass ceiling! 

I have newfound respect for Episcopal Priest Barbie, rector of St. Barbara's-by-the-Sea in ... Malibu, Calif., of course.