Mabel and Mavis move in

Meet Mabel and Mavis, who have bought Abigail and Manuel's house, complete with furniture and cats, thereby completing the big-headed domination of local civilization.

Talavera and Tonala aren't sure what to make of the large new kitten, Taormina.

Mabel and Mavis are 6" high gals who are all over San Francisco's Chinatown as $2.99 key chains. Their extended family can be found with blonde hair, peach hair, and occasionally slightly darker brow hair -- but all the girls are Caucasian, with the same white-pink skin tone. I couldn't resist their sheer big-headedness.

Please come along for size and style comparisons to other dolls, the rest of the Chinatown shopping trip, and one surprise.

The Advent of Abbie

When is a fakie not a fakie?

Abbie takes pink to levels that Barbie only dreams of.

A couple days after the Makie Gift Certificate Disaster, Mom emailed me to announce: "We found an articulated fakie!" Given my passion for fakies, nobody was so cruel as to make me wait for Christmas Day, though I did have to postpone Abbie's deboxing until I could go replace the new iPhone that I managed to destroy within 24 hours of getting it as my free upgrade, coincidentally right as my flight to California was delayed, which led to the discovery that it's impossible to make a long-distance call from a payphone at Sky Harbor, which... most important travel tip: Don't be me. Not being me will save you endless trouble.

Anyway, it's time to debox Abbie.

Abbie's dressing room was furnished from Restoration Hardware.

I try a Dollar Tree clothing pack so you don't have to

In the past, when the Dollar Tree at Christown Spectrum Zombie Mall has carried fashion-doll clothing packs, they've looked so ghastly that resistance was easy. However, this year, we have a pack with JEANS.

Those purple accessories go with nothing.

Hoping that the jeans were not stitched to the top in some manner that prevented separating them, I bought a set. I can make fashion-doll jeans, but for $1, maybe I don't want to.

Three Little Fakies From School Are We!

We can stand short sleeves in December -- we're all MONSTERS.

On Thanksgiving Day, Dollar General started a Buy One, Get One 50% Off toy sale, so Nile got some friends: Dracuheather (known to her pals as D'Heath) and Howlouise. Then I made dresses for all of them, which get their close-up after the jump -- along with Big Sister/Little Sister photos with their Monster High originals.

(Where I've been for six weeks? Well, I started NaNoWriMo in fine fettle, then on November 15 came down with... something. It consisted mostly of mind-numbing fatigue, to the point where my boss took a hard look at me and told me to go home and work from home until after Thanksgiving. So I did that. And since then, I've been catching up from two weeks of getting very little done. But I'm better now, in a confused way.)