Welcome to Cheesecake Dreams!

January 2023

1/25/2023

Well this month has certainly been a busy one. I think the biggest thing that happened was that I decided to change my wardrobe room around. Previously I had a daybed to use as a bed/sofa/guest bed, but it just took up so much space in the room I really didn't have a lot of floorspace for projects, nor did I have a permanent setup for my sewing machine. The sewing machine was the biggest issue: every time I wanted to sew something I had to unbury it from the floor, move everything on the desk to accommodate it, and set it all up, then take it all down when I was done. It was such a hassle that it often made me not want to do it at all. After one of my best friends decided to get rid of her guest futon in exchange for a loft bed and showed us all pics of how well it worked, I realized that perhaps I should consider the same.

I think when I was originally looking at beds for this room, I did initially consider a loft but ultimately decided that a daybed would be cuter/safer/more accessible etc, and all that was true, but the room itself is just... Too small. It's too small and for everything I have crammed in here (my wardrobe, my crafting/sewing supplies, my toy collection...) It just was too much. So I finally bit the bullet, did a lot measuring and re-measuring, and bought a twin-size loft bed.

The loft bed takes about the same amount of space that the original daybed did, but now I can put my entire desk setup underneath it and essentially free up an entire section of the room!


_{Here's the current setup... I do want to get a new desk that utilizes the space better but for now this is already a massive improvement, even though there's still much to be done.}

Putting the whole thing together was so stressful because it actually arrived a week earlier than estimated so I wasn't like... Emotionally prepared I guess lol. I cried so much because I was so upset the daybed didn't work out, because I really loved the frame and how easy and comfy it was to fall into and curl up with my stuffed animals... It takes significantly more effort to do that in the loft above lol. It also takes longer to make the bed, unfortunately. I do think once I get a 3 or 4-step folding stepladder that will help immensely, because the built-in ladder is hard to climb and also hurts your feet, which I knew from reviews. But I specifically wanted one with the ladder vertically built in to save floorspace instead of having a leaning ladder that branches out from the bed. I think I'll still put some squishy vinyl shelf liner around the ladder wrungs though, I got some rolls with a little floral pattern on them that are pretty cute.

This loft bed also has shelves built into it, and a little desk that you can see on the left in the photo! I covered the shelves in pink glitter and silver holo vinyl sticker paper, which is a much nicer look than the dark brown fake wood grain they had on them originally. Now I can finally have a permanent sewing station and I am soooo pleased! I think I'm also going to cover the walls behind the iridescent fringe curtains in artwork from favorite artists! Maybe. That might look too busy though idk.

The other noteworthy thing this month was rediscovering my childhood passion for furbies!! I got one of the originals in 1998 and liked it a lot, it was either Witch's Cat or Skunk I don't remember, and I got it for Christmas? Birthday? Idk I was like two. But I do remember that it woke me up in the middle of the night and I started crying, and my parents were pissed because there was no on/off switch. They ended up taking the batteries out, but it still had residual energy from the batteries so it wouldn't shut up and got locked away into a cupboard. The next day, it was given to one of my friends. I remember feeling bad, like I'd betrayed it, but it gave me nightmares. I also had the video game for Windows 98, and played it a lot, often wishing that I still had my furby and that I wasn't afraid of them. I had some McDonalds furbies I tried to play with instead, but they just weren't the same.

In 2012 my friends and I were horsing around in Walmart at 1AM (something we often did--look in a rural town where everything closes at 8 you have very little options for entertainment.) Poking through the toy aisle, someone pointed out the new Furby Booms and Shishi and I literally screamed. We were SO EXCITED!!! Shishi had also had a furby, but I think they lost it in an incident with their family. We bought them immediately, rushed home, ripped open the boxes, put the batteries in and started installing the apps on our phones... And started getting migraines. "Shishi, can you hear that?" I asked, rubbing my temples, because there was a high pitched whiny noise coming from somewhere. Shishi paused, frowning and then starting to recoil as she started to recognize it too. "Dude what is that?" I remember a feeling of dread sinking into the pit of my stomach as I looked down at my brand new furby friend... Picked it up and put my ear closer--yep, definitely coming from the furby. We quickly turned both of them off and I consulted Google: other people were also complaining about it, because it turns out Hasbro had decided to upgrade the tech in furbies to allow them to better communicate with each other and the app. They used a high-pitched radio frequency that usually only children and animals can hear... But it turns out people with autism can also be sensitive to it.

(Which like... I just wanna pause for a second and ask Hasbro: why? Furbies are toys for... For children. Who are prone to hearing this frequency. Why would you use something that can alienate your entire core audience? Why????

Anyways, we were devastated, looking at each other lost and confused because we so desperately wanted these new little friends... But we couldn't stand turning them on. So we went back to Walmart, with our boxes in shreds, and apologized profusely to the people at Customer Service and explained why we had to return them. I don't think we were the first.

Well, all that to say that now I'm an adult with an adult job and adult money. If I want a furby again... What's to stop me? I have the infinite worldwide web at my disposal. Armed with my debit card and smart phone, after watching PlushiePath's video essay on A Deep Dive Into the Furby Fandom, I decided to take the plunge and adopted my first few furbies. And also embark on the journey of creating a long furby from scratch. Sherbet the long furby was finished a day after Tansy, Despina, and Snowball all arrived in the mail, and now I'm obsessed with adopting my first 2005 furby after falling in love with the exhausted little creeps through adorable Instagram photos of them in hats and capes going on adventures outside. I'm going to be visiting my mom for Valentine's Day, and she's already been informed that the furbies are coming along for the ride--and she couldn't be more delighted by my silly antics.


_{The gang: Sherbet, Snowball, Tansy, and Lady Despina on the old daybed (RIP.)}




1/3/2023

Wow! I simultaneously can't believe that it's the new year already and also feel like this should have come sooner, like for real it felt like 2022 was never ending! So much happened in 2022, not just for me but it seems so for every single person I've talked to, and most of it wasn't necessarily good. A lot of us lost friends/family in 2022, myself included, and it was just a really rough year for so many people. :( I, for one, am so fucking glad it's a new year. Finally we get a bit of a reset and a fresh start because like, while plenty of good things happened in 2022... I really hope 2023 is better all around.

My partner and I didn't do anything particularly interesting for NYE! We just came home from work, had some drinks, barely managed to stay up till midnight, and then pretty much immediately went to bed lol, we're old people deep down inside. While he worked New Year's day, I had the day off as my store was closed so I got to sleep in a teensy bit, take a refreshing shower, and just kind of... Let my strange little brain decide what it wanted to do on the first day of the year, and that was cleaning apparently! I did all the dishes, put said dishes away, did laundry, tidied up the living room and the kitchen counters, scrubbed the microwave, and even tidied up a bit in my wardrobe room iirc. It was very productive! And yet when I went to bed at the end of the night I felt disappointed, because while I did love cleaning and my brain really was like purring at doing chores, there was another part of me that wanted to do other things like idk... Work on this website, or my dusty youtube channel, or sew things for my Etsy shop. But there just ain't enough time in one day, yknow?


_{Wow, look at that sparkling clean microwave~}

That being said, because of the recession, our sales for the last half of the year were not super good at work. Unfortunately this means that for January and February my departments hours have all been cut, including my own. I'm now working only 3-4 days a week, and while on the one hand I'm kind of excited to have some extra days off to work on other projects here at home (namely my shop and hopefully my YT channel) I know that my paychecks are NOT gonna be exciting. That's gonna be very stressful actually. :') I just gotta be good, not spend extra money, and hopefully I can clutch it out till March, which is when Easter Bunny season should be rolling in.

I'm kind of waffling back and forth on the first things I want to start sewing for my shop, I think I'm going to do a bit of a belated winter release: a few capelets and some velveteen rectangle headdresses, the headdresses are what I'll start on first. I also need to make a butt-ton more wristcuffs, I've been bad and haven't made any since last spring, whoops. Life just got in the way. I'm also hoping that with this time off I can get out to the thrift stores again here in the next couple days and maybe find some new Beloveds to pop into the shop! They're very popular, and I'm glad that I can help lolitas beef out their wardrobes with nice pieces. Blouses and cutsews are always the hardest items for most lolitas to obtain, either the brand ones cost too much or they don't fit etc. etc., and when you're a newbie buying your first main pieces really does soak up all your spending money like a damn sponge. I remember, I was there lmao.

But yeah! That being said I'm excited to hopefully get to designing some new headpieces tomorrow so I can start sewing on Thursday and maybe have them up in my shop by the end of the weekend if things go well! I'm going to try and focus on doing smaller batch releases so that way there's always something new on the shop, rather than wait and do massive stock drops once every couple of months. Hopefully that helps maintain some interest in my shop and gives me more to update the store instagram with, right?