The problem with designing from real life.

I first started working on this doll last year, when I heard that my high school classmate Yvette Monroe had died suddenly.

I prob’ly hadn’t seen Yvette in thirty years: I remember when I met her husband Yusef, and their beautiful baby girl Monique.

Yvette had turned out braver than I ever expected, falling in love with a man her small-town family didn’t approved of, and snapping her fingers at them and building her new life together with him.

Yvette Monroe and Lila May Roybal were the first two people I met on my first day of school at West Las Vegas Junior High in 1978. Yvette played the clarinet in the band, Lila played the flute, Alicia played the piccolo, and I was a drummer.

That first day of school, Lila asked me if the school was very different from my old one in California, and Yvette asked me if the boys were cuter in California. (given they my prior experience was limited to boys at my very small Catholic schools, I was quick to acknowledge that the WLV boys were way cuter. Not to mention taller.)

We spent one summer learning baton twirling for marching band. Alicia and Lila and Yvette went on to become baton twirlers.

Our high school mascot (in a repetition of Conquest and erasure) was the Dons, and our marching band outfits were white shirts with a ruffle and black tie, a forest green bolero vest with a gold button panel in the front, and flared green trousers with a gold stripe down the leg that flared into a gold triangle. With a black felt hat, with black pompoms all around the brim.

The twirler outfit was a modified version of this, with a long-sleeved gold blouse, a green and gold skirt with bootie shorts (then described as “spanky pants”), green bolero vest, black boots, and the hat.

So that’s what I’m trying to recreate with this doll: shapely body, bronzed skin, dark brown curls.
I’m sure Yvette’s (and Lila’s and Alicia’s) daughters and granddaughters never imagine she wore booty shorts.

The difficulty lies in the fact that I prob’ly don’t have enough sunshine gold yarn. I’m at the top of the sleeves.

I thought I had a whole skein of gold yarn. but it’s a different brand and more of an “antique gold” than sunflower.

As a doll designer, I could switch to green at this point and make the top look more like a rugby shirt, which would be hella cute.

But that’s not what the twirler uniform looked like.

I did find a tiny little ball of the right color yarn, and i’m playing “yarn-chicken” trying to finish the project before the color runs out.

I could prob’ly manage to make the top a scoop neck, like a leotard.

But that’s not what the twirler uniform looked like.

There’s a pretty good chance I’m going to end up unravelling the gold blouse I made for butterfly boi earlier this weekend. <>

[Later]

I finished the blouse and the head without running out of either yarn! Up next: wig, face, bolero, and skirt.

[Later still]

Person’s wig is pinned on now. The pinheads make it look like they have pink pearls in their hair.