1950s Project Update

 Jenny's dress is coming along quite well. It has had it's share of hiccups. I can see I'm going to have to do something to force the little dodads on the shoulders to lie flat. I couldn't find quite the fabric I wanted. I would have preferred a crisp cotton or silk with polka dots. Actually now I'm wishing I'd thought to make it from white broderie anglaise with a plain light blue cotton under dress and trim. But I'm still happy with it possibly mostly because I know I would have had a hard time finding broderie anglaise in the middle of Winter.
 It doesn't have the skirt attatched yet. I wanted to starch the underskirt so the dress stuck out properly but apparently real starch (the kind you soak fabric in, not the spray on ironing kind) doesn't exist anymore. At least I can't find anywhere that sells it and nobody seems to remember it ever existing. When I was a kid, my mum used to have to starch my folk-dancing petticoats until they could stand up by themselves. That's kind of how I want the underskirt and you don't get that effect with the spray on stuff.
 Even so my mum suggested spray starching the underskirt as much as I can, then sewing some stiff net or tulle into the hem of the underskirt and covering the top of the hem with a length of grosgrain ribbon. If that works, I'll probably have this finished tomorrow. If not, I'm going to need to make a petticoat and I'd rather not have to do that.

Pedigree Brighton Belle

Cute, but probably going to kill me in my sleep eventually.

  Meet this month's victim, Jenny, a 28 inch Pedigree Brighton Belle. Pedigree dolls were very popular in Australia, England and New Zealand in the 1950s. These hard-plastic dolls fade over the years to look like they've been carved from bleached bone. They have flirty eyes and a walking mechanism and a "Mama" voice box. They look a lot like the American Saucy Walker dolls. Perhaps they were made from the same moulds?


 Mine originally belonged to a family friend who got her for her birthday in about 1956. She held onto her for years, planning to pass her down to her daughters, except she only had sons. So when I was four, she passed her down to me. At that point she still had her original dress, shoes and petticoat, (although I don't remember her ever having socks or underpants) and she was wrapped in a dry cleaning bag and put away on the top shelf of our bedroom wardrobe, to keep her nice. Her original outfit was a simple, sleeveless frock of pale blue lace over a bone-coloured, nylon, taffeta petticoat.


 A few years later my mother decided that I was old enough to have her on display in my room and washed her clothes. Her dress did not survive the washing machine. Her petticoat fared better but the press stud that did it up came off and was lost. Since then her hair's gotten a little thin from being brushed and my sister cut her fringe. At some point she lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, but I don't know whether that was before I got her or not. Her eyes are a little funny and cloudy these days, she has a chip in the back of her neck because when I was ten her head fell off. The rubber band that held it on had rotted through. My Dad replaced the rubber band but her neck got chipped in the process. Her lip paint chipped off, and my Mum repainted her lips with nail polish. Her talking box was removed so it could be taken to the doll hospital to get a replacement but for some reason it never actually got replced.

This dress probably wouldn't look so frumpy if

I gave the poor kid a petticoat.

  Over the years she's had a lot of clothes. Mostly re-purposed baby clothes but my sister and I also made her clothes. Some stuff we actually sewed. Some stuff was us adding lace or puff paint to tops our brother had outgrown. All of those clothes were lost in a house fire and for a few years she just wore her petticoat. I tried making her clothes as an adult but nothing I made suited her. The cut was wrong or the colour was wrong. And then one day, by chance, I found the dress she's wearing now in an op shop. And it fits like it was made for her. . . but I hate it. The pattern looks like old sheets, the bib is too dark, the lace is too big, the bow is too bright and the little pink appliques make no sense. So when I drew 1950s for this month's theme, I decided to make her a new dress. A proper dress. Hopefully a dress that I don't hate. So far I've drafted a basic bodice pattern but haven't fitted it yet and done some research into 1950s clothes. That has surprised me. Because of the big skirts, I always think of the 1950s as being like a romanticised version of the mid-victorian period or "Gone with the Wind" but with shorter skirts. All fluffy and frothy and pretty. To my surprise, I'm finding that despite the big skirts, the fashions of the 1950s actually tended to be cut and trimmed in very structured, masculine designs.

Jenny is terrified because Petra Wobbly Legs keeps falling over on her

  I really love this doll in a way I can't really explain, possibly because I've had her forever. And she is really well made. I have a second Pedigree doll, Petra, that's about ten years younger than Jenny. Petra is 30 inches tall and she still has her original dress and shoes and a working walker mechanism but nowhere for a voice box and the quality is just not the same. Jenny is smooth hard-plastic of the kind that's almost like bakelite. Petra is mostly hard vinyl with a hard plastic torso but it's not the same hard plastic. Petra's torso is a thinner, brittle plastic with an uneven surface that feels cheap. Jenny's hair is wigged and while it has suffered in the last sixty year, it's still nice. Petra's hair is a lovely colour butit's poorly rooted and really the fact that it's a nice colour is probably the only nice thing you can say about it. Jenny's face is adorable and lifelike with an open mouth with little teeth and a tongue inside. Petra's face is pretty generic and her eyes are weirdly squished over to one side of her face. Even Petra's shoes, which are the same size and design as Jenny's, aren't as nice. The plastic feels cheaper, the moulding isn't as crisp and they use a different kind of press stud to do up which is threatening to tear through the plastic.

Poor wobbly, wonky Petra

  So I'm going to take advantage of drawing 1950s to clean Jenny up a little (nothing drastic, just a wipe down and possibly scrub her shoes because they're filthy) and make her a new dress. Something blue and faded that hopefully won't make her look washed out.

Winter, work and plans

It's Winter with a vengance. Our last two Winters have been so mild that any overnight frost has melted by the time the sun has risen.
  But this weekend when I took the dog outside in the morning, everything in the backyard was coated in a layer of ice. Puddles were frozen and there were weird little patches of ice here and there. At seven am this wasn't weird but the ice didn't melt until after ten! Which may have meant there was a lot of time when I was wandering around poking all of the frozen things like a five year old. I can't remember ever seeing a frost so heavy that took so long to melt but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. My memory is rubbish.
  It made me worry that we were in for an insanely cold Winter, some people were even talking about snow! But this morning we're back to no frost at all which was reassuring.

  I survived my nightmare run at work, without biting anybody. But (as you can probably tell by how cranky my Baby Secrets review was) I did get fairly grumpy. The boys weren't doing their share at home, the baby wasn't sleeping through the night, we all got sick and to top off all the fun, my nearly nineteen year old cat had a seizure. That's his second one now. The vet says this means he probably has a brain tumour but other than that he's ridiculously healthy. In the middle of all this Early Childhood Intervention started calling about the Giant Baby again, despite having been told he wasn't eligible for their assistance. Ultimately they rejected his application for testing again. One thing I've discovered from talking to them and making appointments for hearing tests and speech therapy and so forth, is that a remarkable number of people can't read the Giant Baby's name. I would totally understand if we'd given him a made up name but he has a completely traditional name with the traditional spelling and the number of people that look at his name and react like it's the most bizarre thing they've ever seen, blows my mind.

  The new season of Shopkins Happy Places is out. I don't know if I'm going to buy them or not. I still don't have one set from the last season. Every shop nearby is still overstocked with Bubbleisha, the bathroom girl from season one. And if it's going to be nightmarishly hard to get my hands on all of them again, I just can't be bothered. But that doesn't mean I won't change my mind and buy them anyway.

  I have trouble getting stuff done. Part of the issue is that I over-plan things. I put off starting things until I've planned them to death. By then, I'm starting to get bored with whatever the thing is and as soon as I start making whatever I've been planning, I start planning the next thing. Which firstly makes it hard to concentrate on what I'm actually doing and secondly ensures I'm going to be bored with the second thing before I even start it.
  So I've come up with a plan to hopefully combat this. I bought a little ceramic jar. I wrote prompt words on small scraps of paper and folded them and put them in the jar. Some of the words are date periods, some are words like "sparkle" or "play" where I could make anything this word makes me think of. For example if I pulled out the word "Movie", I could dress a doll as a movie character, in a replica of a dress from a movie, as an actress or actor, in an outfit to go to the movies in or simply in an outfit that has a print that is somehow reminiscent of movies etc.
  On the first of each month, I plan on pulling one of these slips of paper from the jar and using it as inspiration to design and make something for one of my dolls. This way I don't have time to overplan and I can't start planning ahead because I won't know what the next prompt will be. I can't guarantee this will make me more productive but I'm hoping it will.
  So I couldn't influence what word was chosen, I had the Giant Husband pick out my word for the month last night. (I also figured that doing it this way would make me ashamed to demand a redraw if I didn't like the word I picked.) He pulled out 1950s. So this month, I have to make something 1950s inspired. So far, I know which doll it will be for, but that's it.

  If anyone reading this can think of a word suggestion for my jar, please leave a comment. The more words I have, the better.