Stitching and Digressions

     More mending to do today. It's still snowy out, with a promise of rain this afternoon which will lead to seventeen acres of winter mud, so being in the loft with my hand sewing where I can see the weather but not feel it is lovely. The view out my windows is entirely sky and treetops, so it is a bit like working in a treehouse. The wood fire in the stove downstairs keeps it cozy up here, there is good natural light from the windows but lamps aplenty if I need them. and obviously the wireless laptop works up here as well, or you would not be reading this.
  The dogs, the rabbits and the cats are all draped around the furniture napping. (Except the rabbits, who are actually snugged away in their secret corner and I have no idea what it looks like back there because I respect the privacy of their hutch-space. No doubt when we build their outdoor hutch and I clear out that back corner I shall be appalled.)
   In the kitchen below me there's citrus peel gently simmering for a batch of mixed citrus marmalade. The warm summery smell is coming up to me between the floor boards.  
      One of the things I love best about this loft is the floor.
      The Manimal  built this house twenty-some years ago and slapped a quick "temporary" coat of protective paint on the upstairs floors.  Somehow "proper" flooring never got to the top of the priority list or fit into the household budget. No carpet, no linoleum, no tile or parquet flooring. None of the things he and his then-wife dreamed of doing. All we have up here in my big room that was once the two family bedrooms is the long boards original to the build.  They have a 20 year old coat of paint on them, plus everything that has happened up here floor-wise in two decades, so they look like this:

Two different colors of paint and the jucture where the common wall and the doorway between the rooms used to be.

    This is truly my favorite floor of all the floors in all the twenty-some places I have lived. I love the fact that is is just what it is. I love that there's nothing about it I am likely to hurt with my sometimes messy artistic endeavors.  Deep in my deepest heart of hearts I do not much care for fancy things. I prefer things to be simple and straightforward. Which may be two words come to think of it.

   When I first moved to the valley there were boxes and boxes of parquet flooring tiles in the loft closet and more in a storage unit in town. Beautiful hardwood flooring, if you are into that kind of thing. Expensive too. The parquet flooring was the idea (insistence might be a better word).of The Previous Girlfriend, whom I think of uncharitably as Girlzilla.  NICE flooring was part of her endless and ever-increasing list of requirements to make this house Good Enough for her highness to deign to reside in. (Note that before she came along it was quite good enough to raise three kids in.) 

     What can I say? Women who require a man to remake his entire life to suit them have a tendency to fade away, and rugged life in the hinterland is unsuited to ersatz royalty. Girlzilla did not reside here after all. When she faded away the ton of parquet flooring remained in her wake.  Ok, not a ton. I am probably exaggerating for dramatic effect. Let's see......oh, it's more like 2400 pounds. Sixty pounds a box. Oy.

      It was a very happy day for me when I was able to (after muuuuuuuch discussion) convince The Manimal that rather than install the flooring up here (which would have been a hideous amount of work) and begin the long process of turning this space into a fancy room it would be better to let his oldest son  (the Wild One) take the 40 boxes of floor tiles to his land in the next county for a house he was rennovating.  I was happy to see the flooring go. Happy not to have the loft turn into a place with shiny polished floors that need "taking care of".

     I've been mending The Manimal's jeans. Happy work, this.  They start out very stiff and very black, gradually become softer black, then dark grey, then dark grey with worn spots. Eventually they are medium grey with holes.  They have never gotten to light grey, they fall apart long before that. When the holes start to appear  I add patches and reinforcing stitches here and there as needed. When we get to where all his trousers are patched it is time for a new pair. I think the next time he gets new jeans I'll embroider the date inside the waistband  so I can see how long they actually last. I'm curious.

    Having grown up in the hippie era The Manimal is both allergic to formal clothing and quite fond of patches, so I don't have to try to find matching bits of cloth or exact matches of thread for the hundred grey tones the fabric devolves into with time.  In fact his color preference for patches is "the more the merrier, but no pink."
       This is a pleasant thing for me as I was raised by a large matriarchal tribe of stitching women, and nothing pleases me more than a bit of freespirited darning and patchworking.
    I do not remember ever visiting any of my aunties houses without there being some bit of sewing going on, whether it was pillowcases being embroidered for a church bazaar or a wedding present (it was always His and Hers in those days), a dress being made, a blouse yoke being  crocheted or a pair of dungarees being mended.  At Mamaw's house most often it was a quilt top being patchworked or appliqued or else the quilt frame was up and a half dozen women were gathered for a quilting bee.

     This matriarchy of my grandmothers, mother, aunties and adult cousins were mostly married with children. They loved their menfolk dearly, but it was quite clear to me that the men were not the center of anyone's existence. Despite the theoretical patriarchal structure of our churches the women and men lived in separate but slightly overlapping worlds, and regardless of physical geography the women's realm was the larger one.  As a child and most especially a girl child, I was part of the women's world.
     Men allegedly ran the world in those days I am told, but they weren't running the world I lived in. There were Big Men In Washington who did something or other. Men In Town did important things too, although important is a very subjective term and cousin Charlie the candy-maker in town had a far more elevated place in my child mind than the mayor, the president of the country or the bishop of the church.
     My uncles and grown-men cousins were variously sailors and truck drivers who were at home sometimes but often gone. My Papaw was retired from the coal mines and was usually outside, tending the garden and orchard, building things, teaching my brother and boy cousins.
       Papaw had built the house itself a long time ago, and added on rooms as the children were born. One by one as his daughters married he built houses for them on his land. I beleive there was not one level floor in any of the houses. They did however have charm. 
   The whole unpaved road in front of Mamaw's house led uphill past aunties' houses straight to my cousin Pattycake, who aside from flaming red hair and an adventurous spirit had the added virtue of being my age.  
By 'my age' I mean just younger than me.
      The cousins older than me were sort of lumped together in a groups, as we'd all managed to be born in something almost like litters. When I was four or so there was a batch of cousins all grown up and moved to town or further, several more of high school age, a handful of not yet teens and a handful of gradeschoolers. Since there was a 4 year gap between me and my brother I qualified as "little".  Those my brother's age saw me primarily as a little pest to be avoided.  Being OLDER is a big deal in childhood, although not for any good reason that I could see. My parents were both the youngest children of large families, so as their baby I was forever destined to be one of  "the little cousins".
      There were three of us, all girls. Me-the Chatterbox with my lank sandy dishwater hair, Pattycake who was named after my red-haired mama, and Merrycat with her thick dark tresses who was the youngest (I think) and also very much the prettiest. We three were the end of the cousin line.  Younger than us there would be no more first cousins, only second and third cousins, which is something else indeed. You could marry second and third cousins, although I could not see why anyone would want to.

  (Let us take a moment here to ponder the myseries of genetics. My mother was a redhead as were two of her older sisters. The rest of her sisters and all her brothers had black hair.  My father's hair was black, like most of his siblings, one of his sisters was a redhead, all his nieces and nephews had black hair.
My brother and I, with our ash-blonde hair looked suspiciously like we'd been heisted from a passing baby carriage. Why did we not get red hair or black? I have no explanation for this. Life is a mystery. My black-haired father had been born white-blonde but as he grew his hair slowly darkened.  I waited hopefully for years for my hair to darken to glossy black like his. I am still waiting.)

   My Uncle Dick had a garage across the lane from Mamaw and Papaw's house where he fixed big trucks. He would stop in to see if Mamaw needed anything, so he was the most present and most 'real' of my uncles. 
    Daddy was the glass tank specialist in town, where they made liquid glass from sand then poured it out and cooled it and cut it into windows. He liked to tell stories to us children, and when he was with us at Mamaw's house cousins would pile on the couch around him to listen to the stories he made up about us. They were impromptu serial stories, our favorite themes being The Deep Dark Jungle, Homesteading in Alaska, Meanwhile Back on the Ranch, and Outer Space.  The cast of characters would be whichever of the cousins were present for the telling, and the themes overlapped so that Pattycake might be landing her spaceship to visit Merrycat and Chatterbox on their ranch, and she would bring strange and delicious exotic foods from far off worlds.   
    It occurs to me that the one thing all the men of my family had in common was an extraordinary fondness for children. As young couples they double-dated with their young wives and brought their babies along just to add to the fun. Truly, what could be more fun than taking the whole extended family to the Frost-Top for hot dogs and root beer? What could make the evening memorable more than a slightly feverish baby projectile hurling up his rootbeer in an arc across all those lucky enough to be sitting in the back seat with him?
    In our era parents did not waft about throwing out "I Love You"s like they do now, but they were present and attentive parents, happy to have us about, pleased to teach us about life, and we knew without a doubt that we were loved.  There were no "career oriented" adults in my family. I don't remember even hearing the term. People we knew did not work to prove they were special, or to be wealthy, or to change the world. They worked to make a living so that they could have a home and children and grandchildren. Family was the point of life, and what we little cousins wanted from life was to grow up and have more family. 
    In this day and age I suppose that sounds really odd. Back then it just sounded happy and fun.

    Somewhere in my addled little brain I think I thought my life would be much like Mamaw's.  I'd have a house full of children, and they would have lots of babies.  They would all live around me, and we'd visit back and forth and have huge Sunday dinners together.  As it happened I got four dandy offspring (one ash blonde like me and three redheads if you're wondering) and 75% of them live far away. The Manimal and I get periodic visits from my Oldest child, who lives closest and has 1.3 children,. 
We have occasional visits from my others, Middle Child in particular can be counted on to stop by as she and her Honeylamb move back and forth across the country.  We love these visits.  The Manimal's three bachelor sons stop in now and then, usually unexpectedly and on the fly. They are busy conquering the world. Our home is not (not yet?) the scene of huge family dinners as we have not (yet?) a huge family.
 

   Which is ok.

 Life is what it is, and I'm not complaining.

  If I, like my Mamaw, had 35 grandchildren constantly dropping by, when would I find the time to mend The Manimal's jeans?

Or blog?

Or design my own fabric and make a bunny?

INSIGHTS:

1-Rapunzel likes grey-haired men who build their own houses and who incline towards pack-rattery.

2-Rapunzel prefers unpaved roads. They keep the riff-raff away.

3-Rapunzel is NOT genetically predisposed to becoming house-proud.

4-Rapunzel loves black hair and does not understand why she did not get it. She thinks people who think blue-eyed blonde girls are the prettiest must be at least half-blind.

5-Rapunzel does not much worry her pretty head about What Men Do All Day. She knows if they want to they will tell her, but she's not going to pry it out of them.

6-Blogs with less text and more pictures are more fun to look at, but blogs with more text are more fun to write.  This may be partly because when one's head is going-on 56 years old  not everything in it is available to be photographed.

Ze Life, she iss Good.

P.S.    My other grand accomplishment of the past few days has been to entirely organize and file neatly ALL of The Manimal's household and business bills, receipts and bank statements by month and by category.

Because The Manimal is the sort to cram things higglety pigglety into his many pockets all the day long the receipts looked ghastly and were hard to read. So in a cheery effort to be a good helpmeet I got out my iron and pressed them into tidy smoothness. I suggest you do  not try this at home.

Actually I only pressed three of them. When I flipped them over they had turned entirely black. Apparently receipts are now being made of something other than real paper. Sheesh!  Of course I did not proceed with the several hundred remaining receipts in the pile, I just smoothed them as well as I could with my fingers and called it good enough.

This annual ritual of paperwork took approximately forever, or in real time two whole  days.   He is now prepared to do his taxes, should such an odd thought occur to him, which it probably won't this soon as the deadline is not until April 15th..   The following day I did my taxes, which took less than a whole day, and I'm happily awaiting my tax return. He's a last possible moment guy and I'm a file early girl. Opposites attract. 

According to the internet this is a Columbian Lithograph.  I could not find a date for it, but it is like the one that hung in my  Mamaw's front room just above Uncle Charlo's chair. As Uncle Charlo was blind  I assumed he did not know it was there.  It was Uncle Charlo who nicknamed me Chatterbox, after what was to him my most notable characteristic. By notable I mean the thing that made me stand out from my 35 cousins.  If he had not lost his eyesight in a coal mine explosion long before I was born, he could have just as easily dubbed me Bruisy or Bedhead or Stickyface. 
    When I was a chattery little mite I firmly believed this little girl in the litho was a photograph of my mama as a child.  This in spite of the fact that I had seen actual bona fide photographs of my mama as a child, her extremely curly hair was never longer than her earlobes and certainly not long enough to braid, and the phoptographs were all in black and white while this child is clearly rendered in some old-timey semblence of living color.      Logic was never my strong suit.          In her later years Mama and I got on the subject of Mamaw's house one day, and she told me, "There was a little picture of a girl watching a bird, which hung on the wall over Uncle Charlo's chair. I imagine it was cut out of a magazine, but when I was little I always thought it was me, and Uncle Charlo said of course it was, look at that red hair!" 

From this story we may surmise that:
 1-Chatterbox  had no grasp of the historical development of the art of photography or lithography.  
 2-Chatterbox and her Mama both fancied themselves the center of the known universe.    
3-Great Uncles tell charming fibs to little children.
4-Our Irish ancestry lives on in the form of flaming hair generation after generation.
5-Clearly someone had told Uncle Charlo there was a picture of a little girl hanging above him and he felt no objection to this because either he felt very secure in his manhood or he didn't give a flying fig about cutesy-poo baby art.

Discuss this amongst  yourselves.

(I love saying amongst.)

Poor Neglected Blog

Dear Little Neglected Blog,
  I apologize for being too sick to blog, then too tired to blog, then too bored with my isolated and uneventful life to blog. Lest you think I've done nothing nothing for 3 weeks but sit in my ivory tower by the window wishing I were anywhere but here I will show you a bit of what I've been working on. (Apart from animal care and hauling firewood that is.)

 

The Manimal is Away

     For a whole week.  As we've only one vehicle working and he drove away in it this morning I'm here in the valley with the animals and my thoughts (which at the moment are grey and gloominous). There's plenty of work to be done, but I don't feel like doing any of it. I could seriously go back to bed and sleep for a week, but there are animals to take care of and a wood stove to keep going. Grumble, grumble, grumble.
    Nevertheless I've set a task for myself and this is as good a day as any to finish up the doll history posts. I certainly don't have to be in a cheery frame of mind to document all the odd little figures that cluttered my childhood.

Pajama bag doll. Note her ribbon clearly stating I Am a Pajama Bag, which certainly explains why her back zip is on her ample skirt instead of her bodice. She is sort of cute if you like that type of thing, which I don't now and didn't as an 8 year old either. I would categorize this one as "one more thing to take care of." Which is true of a lot of things designed to hold other things and also true of a lot of the things given to children.  ( Go clean Your Room!)

Kissy. You squeeze her hands together and her internal mechanisms cause her lips to move slightly accompanied by gutteral boink sound.  I once dated a lad who kissed similarly, and I do mean Once.

Newborn Thumbelina.  At the ripe old age of eleven I actually wanted a doll for Christmas, a Newborn Thumbelina I'd seen at the hardware store a block from our house. She had dark hair, a white lace tunic and bright pink tights. Adorable to my eyes. It was the lace tunic and the pink tights that really won my heart.
 My cousin PJ also found  this doll to be charming and we thought life would be ideal if we each had one. PJ worked on her parents and on Christmas morn found under her tree a regular large sized Thumbelina in a little white dress. Nice, but not what we had in mind.,
Meanwhile across town I had done a good enough job promoting this desire that my parents and my Aunt Dorothy BOTH got me Newborn Thumbelinas, with whitish blonde hair an dressed in bright yellow stretch rompers.  Upon opening the boxes I promptly burst into tears. I didn't want twins, and I didn't want blonde hair or yellow rompers.
This of course revealed me to be an ungrateful child, and I was caused to listen to the sad story of little poor children throughout the world who didn't have any baby dolls at all. My cousin had a similar experience. The thing of note about this story is that it was the last time in my life I bothered being specific about what I wanted for Christmas.   I had arrived at the conclusion that telling grown-ups what you want is a waste of breath.

Winnie the Pooh Spoon Sitters is what these are called on Ebay.They have a wide slot in the crotch that allows them to  sit on the handle of your  spoon while,you eat, and as a bonus their outreaching arms allow them to hang onto the rim of your juice glass. Or milk glass, but a glass of milk is overkill if you already have milk on your cereal. And if you have one of these you are eating cereal, because they came as a premium in cereal boxes. Collect them all.

Mama hand made large Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls for me and my brother when we lived in Mount Vernon, Indiana. She did it just before Christmas, and didn't have time to get their hair put on. Four huge bald rag dolls. I was in 8th grade. Richard was a senior in high school. What  she  was thinking I haven't the faintest idea.

Rat Fink. My brother had a zillion of these. They came from a gumball machine at the little shop across the street from the high school. They were apparently a very cool thing to have, tying in with models of hot rods.,  He gave me the pink ones.

1. Sassy Dolls or Brat Dolls, I'm not sure of the real name. They came with an assortment of facial expressions and some had a tongue that would pop out when you squeezed their belly.



Trolls and a troll house. Ugly, but fun. Tricky to make clothes for, as their arms don't move. My first troll, which had pale green hair, was the second doll I bought myself.  Money well spent no doubt.



another Sassy Doll on the left I think. For a long time I had a doll like the one on the right. . Actually liked her, she had a cheerful face and was easy to make clothes for because her arms and legs moved.

Eskimo doll, from the souvenir shop at Niagra Falls where we went on vacation. These are really well made dolls, I think by Canada's Regal Dolls.

This is the closest picture I could find to our Santa Dolls (Yes/Richard got one too) Our were larger, about three feet tall I think. they had white rubber gloves and black rubber boots and a sturdy black plastic belt with a red plush peplum attached that made it look like he was wearing trousers and a coat.  I really liked Santa.  He was put away with the Christmas ornaments every year, which may have been part of his charm.  Feel free to joke amongst yourselves about his resemblance to The Manimal.

Royal Doll Company's Joy Doll, mine had a much prettier brides dress than this. A fancy bride dress on a doll that has the figure of a toddler. Boggles the mind. Perhaps she's having an arranged marriage?

 

Susie Sad Eyes, the first doll I bought for myself. Got her at the drugstore  between our house and school, in the '60's, with my saved up milk money.  Mama thought she was terrible looking, but I really liked her. Still do, which is why I now have seven of them living in a bookcase upstairs. About 98% of the dolls of my childhood I really didn't care about and have no desire to have back again, but this one I still like.   I wonder why....?  She's not well made, her clothes aren't fashionable or skillfully designed, she doesn't have a wardrobe you can buy or a jolly lot of friends or furniture or a car. No career uniforms, nor accessories. What you see is what you get, just this little plain doll by herself.  Still, she's my favorite.

Thankful Thursday

1-I'm thankful  people aren't feeling compelled to give me dolls anymore. I like the ones I have, but there are a lot fewer of them than I had as a kid, they're chosen by me, and there aren't more of them than I have space for.  Also since these current dolls weren't a gift and no one in the family really cares whether I have dolls at all or not I am free to get rid of  any or all of them any time I choose. I like that. I am inclined to downsize periodically. It is fun logging every doll I was given as a kid, but those dolls were all passed on to others ages ago and I don't want any of them back. Happily no one is mistaking the nostaligic dolly blogs for a wish list.

2-I'm thankful for those green kitchen scrubby pads. They make the world better, particularly in the kitchen. Daddy told me in the old days people scrubbed with "some soap and some sand and a cob in each hand." I imagine that works, but it sure sounds messy, and with drains I think the sand would be a problem.

3-I'm thankful we keep plenty of flour and yeast on hand so I can make fresh bread without having to arrange a trip to town. The worse the economy gets and the more food prices rise the more I appreciate wholesome bread that doesn't cost us $4 a loaf.

4-I'm thankful my good mama taught me to make hard candy. Fun, tasty, and no high fructose corn syrup. Plus there's the entertainment of accidentally breathing in essence of hot cinnamon oil, which will clear your sinuses in a way that is not so much like a neti pot as like a fire hose. Whew!

 

5-I'm thankful  to be finished with the jeans embroidery project. I love to make things and love stitchery, but hand stitching on denim is dreadfully hard on the fingers. I wonder, how long does it take for fingertips to grow back?

6-I'm thankful  for double stick tape. When I learned to make paper beads I was quite little, my brother was a Cub Scout and Mama was one of the Den Mothers. The whole den made paper bead necklaces for Mother's Day. There was paste involved, and brighty colored paint, both things that were beyond my coordination levels and I found this very frustrating. There was the cutting of long tapered strips from magazine pages, and my scissors skills were nothing to write home about either. Although the Cubs managed to get their necklaces done (messily) for me it was an epic fail.

   Half a century on I decided to make paper bead garlands to deck our festive minimalist holiday branch. I used Hannukah wrapping paper (thank you Youngest Child) for the blue-gold-silver color scheme. I cut the strips with a rotary cutter which took no time at all. I rolled the beads on a knitting needle and instead of a pot of paste I used about a half inch of narrow double stick tape at the tip. I skipped the shellacking step as these don't need to last forever and the paper already has a glazed surface. Then I strung the beads with white pearly shirt buttons between them to add a bit of shimmer in candlelight. No more epic fail! Photographed out on the deck because indoors everything seemed to disappear against our dimly lit cluttery background.



Seat cover I made from woven plastic feed bags



Fits the seat nicely, looks satisfyingly make-do-and-mend-ish. 



7-I'm thankful  the tractor seat cover I made for The Manimal fits ok and looks all fancy-schmancy on his John Deere.  In designed it to keep rainwater from pooling in the bucket seat. I got it finished just in time to pop it over the seat before the rains started. Perfect timing, no?
    When the rain abated we scurried outside to check out my invention. Alas-when we lifted the cover the bucket seat had a good pint of rainwater in it. The plastic bag material although sturdy is apparently not waterproof. Back to the drawing board.

 

 

8-I'm thankful Oldest Child made a whole lot of Yo-Yos and gave them to me because she was tired of looking at them. I don't have the patience to make yo-yos, but I may be able to persuade myself to string them together into a yo-yo creature. Probably not a bunny, maybe a kitty.  I had a yo-yo clown when I was little, and I really don't like clowns, so an animal is the way to go I think.

9-I'm Thankful Silly Dog is not a puppy anymore. When she was a puppy she used to chew up everything all the time. Now that she's older she only chews up some things sometimes. This is quite an improvement. It would be wonderful if she would only chew up things we want to get rid of, but I don't really see that happening. 

10-I'm thankful Pandemonium is, despite his name, a skillful sleeper. It is companionable and endearing the way he follows after me and finds himself a nap spot wherever I'm working.

 

That's ten.  Off to work on baby afghans.

Doll Mania 3 or Bored, Bored, Bored.

          The downside of the whimsical decision to document every doll my sweet mama ever gave me is that there were such a darn lot of them.  Some of them have been cute, some less cute and others downright ghastly.  I was five when I got my first fashion doll, the original ponytail Barbie. She was my first, but by far not my last.


Ken, Barbie's fuzzy haired flat-footed boyfriend. Not an athlete. Definite scholastic pallor. My kind of guy.



Alan, Ken's best friend




Midge, Barbie's best friend and naturally Alan's boyfriend.






Skipper, Barbie's sister. I never heard of her until I was given her and her friend for a birthday.




Ricky, Skipper and Scooter's friend and possibly Alan's kid brother, they look alot alike to me.





        .



I probably got interested in sewing primarily because of fashion dolls. My cousin PJ would come down to play when we visited Mamaw and Papaw's house. She would bring her dolls, I would bring mine, and Mamaw would park us on the screened front porch with needles and thread and her scrap bag. It was a good way to keep us occupied





 

Skooter, Skipper's friend.

Mama was of the Collect The Whole Set mindset, so she bought all the Barbie family as soon as they came out, well in advance of my birthday, to be sure she didn't miss out on any. 

Here's a cool idea. Lets buy our kids a ton of stuff they didn't even ask for, then grumble at them for not keeping it all tidily put away.








But I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, fashion dolls.  When I was a schoolkid Mama ordered a set of clothes for Barbie and Ken from the Sears Catalog, or possibly Spiegles.  It was to be a trousseau for their wedding and honeymoon.  When she went downtown to pick it up there had been a backorder and the wedding trousseau was no longer available. Instead she brought home a set of theater costumes. She also got me some clothes from Barbie and Ken's world travel.....Holland, and Mexico.   This I believe may be a blessing in disguise.   Here are a few parts of those costumes.  As you can imagine, (or as you know from living with me most of your life) this extensive set of exotic clothing did far more for my imagination and my fashion sense than a mundane little set of honeymoon clothes would ever have done.



Guenivere's velvet gown, which Ken used to wear to cook breakfast.It wouldn't fasten in the back due to his broad shoulders, but he never seemed to mind.



Cinderella's eeryday dress. look like anyone you know?



Ken's Arabian Nights jacket which went with gold lame pants and pointy toed slippers. He was Shaherizades Genii.

the skirt of Barbie's arabian nights sari. The choli was pink satin, and there was a dupatta that matched the skirt.

Ken's King Arthut gear.

the whole cinderella set, and you just know Barbie wore ken's stuff all the time, especially the balloon pants.

better view of the Guinevere.

The holland outfit, with my favorite skirt ever. That big full skirt made her waist look tiny, haha!


Aside from Barbie and friends I also had a Tammy and a Mary Poppins.  I have no idea whether Tammy was named for the Tammy movies or not, but Mary Poppins definitely was a movie tie in.



These are Topper's Dawn and friends, there were a whole lot of them and I inherited some from a cousin a couple of years older.  They were very fashionable, bu the 70's Dawn dolls had cooler clothes than Barbie, and at 6 inches tall it only took half as much fabric to dress them.



Penny Brite appeared in my life by my request. I actually saw her on the tv commercial, thought she was cute, and wanted one. I think this is the first doll in my life I actually requested. Whoever claims she has bendable posable legs and arms needs to find themselves a dictionary. I still think she's cute, but I always hated the clothes they made for her. The Barbie Theater experience spoiled me for mundane clothes. Oddly enough it didn't occur to me to make clothes for her. She's the same size as /Susie Sad Eyes, and easy to dress, a straight childlike figure.

More later, I wish I could say that's almost all of them, but I wouldn't want to lie.