Pictures coming later

I finished Moondancer last night, but it was too late when I got done for me to do photography and a blog post.

My original plan was to just do the sweater and the hair - figuring the sweater was going to be fiddly and time consuming, and leave the face for tonight. But the sweater actually worked up really fast - I was able to use one of the sock cuffs, unaltered, as the body (I just had to cut armholes in it and hem the bottom, I didn't even have to take it in any) and the other cuff formed the sleeves - I used the finished edge of the cuff as the sleeve cuffs, I sewed two narrow parallel seams down the middle, and then cut apart the two sleeves. I hand-sewed them on to the body over the armholes. I THINK the sweater would be possible to remove (as in: I did not sew it to her body) but I wouldn't want to try, it would mess up her hair.

I did her hair in the funny ponytail thing she had in the "Amending Fences" episode. I even had a tiny pink bobble thing to put on the "ponytail holder" (I only had one, and anyway, could not bring myself to put PINK buttons on the CHARCOAL GREY sweater - it's a good thing Rarity wasn't in that episode, the sight of that sweater would have given her the vapors)

It is tricky doing parti-colored hair the way I typically do hair on these ponies (the "rooted in" way, where you are doing lark's head knots over bits of the crocheting). You have to plan out where the different colors go - I did this with Colgate but it was less successful on her, she looked less like "herself."

Once I got the hair and tail done, though, I decided to go ahead and do the face and "cutie mark" - dug out my felt, found the various colors of thread needed. In the end, I decided to make her smiling; my inner six year old protested that I couldn't make a toy frown, that "no toy should be unhappy all her life" so I gave her a smile.

I also gave her eyebrows, but more "groomed" than some of the pictures of her in the show. (Some fan art eliminates the eyebrows but I think they are sort of necessary. This time I used floss in a color matching the orange in her hair - for Treehugger I used the same hair yarn and they came out a little heavy).

The last step was to make "eyeglasses" out of a chenille stem. These are probably the least pleasing part because they don't really have "glass" in them, but it was the easiest way I could figure to make them without their being super-fragile. (An alternative would have been felt, but when felt is cut into thin bits like that and not anchored flat to anything, it can be very fragile and stretchable.)

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When I decorated for Christmas, I also pulled out some of the Christmas books I had. I have one that goes, decade by decade (well, from 1920s up through 1960s) of Christmas in America and one thing from the late 40s (post-war) or early 50s struck me: Apparently Macy's took out an ad admonishing people for buying "too much" - people in kind of a frenzy after rationing, and also, possibly, fearing rationing could happen again soon, were buying lots of stuff. And it struck me, because it seems so foreign to what we hear now - not all that long after the September 11 attacks, there were admonitions to go out and spend money to help the economy.

I suppose part of that is the difference between a heavily manufacturing-based economy and one that is much more service/consumption based. The funny thing is, before September 11, 2001, the best "war" pattern I had to fit things to in my mind was what grandparents and others had told me about World War II - rationing, the make-do-and-mend idea, avoiding waste - so it was discombobulating to be told it was, for example, part of one's patriotic duty to buy a new car. And I get that we haven't mobilized now as we mobilized back then, and I may not be fully aware of how huge the 1940s war effort was - but I will confess, I was genuinely expecting to see SOME kind of rationing, maybe nothing other than gasoline, but something.

I know that kind of price-control and trying to limit buying stuff happened in the 50s (there is an entire Nero Wolfe novel devoted to the whole price-control and supply issue - it is one of my favorite novels, not because of the plot so much as the character interactions) but it just seems unthinkable that a store today would advertise asking people not to buy things that are not "necessary."

(The closest ad to that I've seen is from the whole TJ Maxx family, but they are saying instead, "Hey, we ALWAYS have sales, so forget that Black Friday mess")

Also, I know it's the Christmas season: last night I saw the first surreal perfume ad of the season. (Perfume companies, watch companies do this. Sometimes high-end liquor manufacturers. It's as if not being able to understand what their ad is about is a sign that it's a luxury product)