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.

Tiny Tuesday - My Mini Mixie Qs

This is an accidental collection. How do you get an accidental collection? Well, when these were first released I bought a couple of the blindbag packs. I was happy with them. I liked them. But they didn't really do anything for me, so I had no intention of buying more. But because I had them, the Giant Husband bought me some more, and more, and more. I was actually quite surprised to see how many I've accumulated.

Mini Mixie Qs are Mattel's contribution to the blingbag toy plague. They're tiny (seriously minuscule) blocky figures and accessories that look kind of pixelated. They're sold in blingbag packs of two, or in packs of several figures sometimes with extra clothes and hair pieces, or in sets with playsets. They have hard plastic wigs and clothing that can be removed and swapped around.

Figure with hair and dress

Some of the outfits are quite plain

Others have tiny attached accessories

And some are even fancier

The multi packs either have one or two figures with lots of extra outfits and hair or a few themed dolls with maybe an accessory or two

Some of the playsets fold up into cubes, others are stackable. 

I have a candy store

And a toy store. The toy store came with more accessories than actually fit inside the store. It also came with extra clothes and wigs (That I didn't photograph because I forgot about them until just now.)

These are actually really cute. (My camera didn't agree! I had a hard time getting it to focus on them at all.) But I think they're more of a novelty than a toy. They're just too small to comfortably play with and once you have the playsets are set up, if anyone so much as breathes near them, all of the teeny tiny accessories fall over and are lost forever!

My favourites are definitely the pink ninja girl and the little dog figure.

Tiny Tuesday - Baby Secrets

 These dolls turned up in our supermarket last week. Little blind bag babies, that come packed in bathtubs. For some reason I felt compelled to check them out. The display they're in, in the store, has a couple of shelves of the bathtubs (each with one doll) and larger packs with two visible dolls, one blind bag doll in a bath, and an accessory. Initially I planned on getting one bathtub and one of the accessory packs. But the only accessory packs left in stock had a highchair which, frankly looked like something from the two dollar shop. I couldn't bring myself to spend sixteen dollars on it, so I got two of the blind bags instead.

 The name Baby Secrets unreasonably irritates me. When I was a kid, I had this doll. . .

named Baby Secrets. And in my head, that doll will always be Baby Secrets and the nine year old that lives in the back of my head is annoyed at her doll's name being stolen.

Anyway, the cover art on the packages, shows extremely cute babies but from the ones I saw in the accessory sets, I had a feeling these dolls weren't going to be as cute. To be honest, lately there is such a proliferation of blind bag toys on the market, that sometimes I wonder if A) The toys that get blind bagged would sell at all if people could see what they were getting (I have an inkling most wouldn't), and B) Whether toy companies think they can sell any piece of rubbish they like by putting it in a blind bag. (I'm pretty sure they do.)

 The first thing you get when you unwrap the bathtub is the obligatory checklist. Dolls on one side. Accessory packs on the other. The checklist makes a big deal about there being 50 dolls. Strictly speaking there are 25. 15 standard blind bag dolls. 1 limited edition furry blind bag doll (That is a total Twosies rip-off). 8 dolls that are exclusive to the accessory packs. And 1 Sparkle blind bag doll, that you can only get in the accessory packs. But each of the dolls has a nappy that changes from white to pink or blue in cold water, so if you have one of each doll in each gender, that's 50 dolls. Except I only ever seem to get girls in things like this, and I can't picture parents being willing to shell out for multiples of each accessory set on the off chance of maybe getting a boy.

Next there's a "Birth Certificate" to fill out. Being an adult, I'm not overly interested in this but it's exactly the sort of thing I would've eaten up with a spoon as a child.

Finally there's a baby in a plastic bag. And wow, they're a lot creepier in real life, than they are in the cartoon artwork! Here are the two I got.

I have to say, I much prefer the one in the ski goggles. Partly because the idea of going skiing in just a nappy, woollen hat, and goggles is just bizarre. I've never been skiing but I'm guessing that if it's cold enough to snow, you probably want to be wearing clothes. But I mostly prefer that one because the goggles cover the face.

All that was left, was to find out if they were girls or boys. The checklist says to dip them in cold water. Whenever anything says to dip something in cold water, I always try putting it in the freezer first. Usually works better and I'm less likely to spill anything. But the freezer didn't work on these two. At all. So I did dip them in cold water and surprise, surprise, they were both girls.

These babies are jointed at the arms and legs and neck. But the heads are difficult to turn and don't turn very far. And after bending and straightening the baby's leg a few times, it started to look like this. . .

I don't know if you can see the little crumbs around the joint of her left leg, but that's plastic, not paint. And given I had only worked that joint maybe three times, that's some pretty shoddy workmanship.

Overall, these dolls seem to me more like a product that would've been for sale in a two dollar shop twenty years ago, than something that would be sold now. They're not very cute at all, their paint is sloppy, their construction is shoddy and the overall impression that I get is that these have been thrown into the market in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Li'l Outrageous Littles and Twosies. Except they completely lack the charm of the other two. And given that the company that makes these is actually the Australian distributor for a lot of MGA toys (including the LOLs), these would really annoy me if I was MGA. Surely developing a product that's in direct competition to a product that you distribute is at best a pretty jerky thing to do!

 It's toys like these that make me sick of blind bag toys.

And now the bad news . . .

The Giant Baby had his hearing test. Leading up to it, I didn't think about it too much. I kept thinking back to a year ago when he discovered that he could see trains from our backyard if someone picked him up. As soon as the boom gates started making noise, he would ask to be picked up, even though half the time I couldn't even hear them. I didn't realise he hasn't done that in a very long time or that now he only asks to watch the trains if one toots.

 He did not do well on the hearing test at all. But they couldn't draw any conclusions from it either, because it turned out he had an ear infection when they did the test. He has to do a second test but not until the end of July.
 I finally looked up some information on hearing problems in toddlers and now I feel terrible. So many things we just took for granted as being cute or even clever are actually more likely signs he hasn't been hearing properly for a while now.
 For the last few months he's been developing his own sign language. Nothing ridiculously sophisticated. In fact it's pretty basic stuff. If he's thirsty, he'll bring me a book open to a picture of a drink and point to it, then point to the kitchen. If he wants to watch something on television, he will bring me a toy or book from the show he wants and then point to the dvd player. That kind of thing.
 We thought he was so very clever because he could tell us what he wanted without even trying to verbalise it. (Unless we say no, he verbalises his displeasure with that pretty darn effectively.) It didn't even occur to us that the fact that he wasn't even trying out new words was probably a bad sign.
 I also feel particularly terrible because after seeing the audiologist, we went tothe doctor and it turns out his ear infection is so bad, he has blisters on his ear drum! That sounds incredibly painful to me, but I didn't even know that he had an ear infection. Although in all fairness, I've been watching him like a hawk since then and I swear that he has shown absolutely no sign of having an ear infection.
 So, he's on the waiting list for speech therapy, and he has another hearing test booked. At this point we're fairly certain there is going to be an issue with his hearing and are praying that it's something that can be solved with ear tubes or grommets. Yes, that will require surgery but it's also temporary and fixable so definitely preferable to something permanent or unfixable.

Because of all this, I've been having far too much fun making various appointments and beating myself up about this to do anything doll related this last week. And on top of that, one of the ladies that I work with had emergency surgery on Monday and now I'm covering a lot of her shifts. So for the forseeable future, I am working every night until I have a complete breakdown, then probably sobbing in a corner for a few days at least, before I can even think about doing anything worth posting about.

 To make things even more fun, I also messed up the other day and the baby finally got his Shirley Temple curls cut off. Basically, since the weather has turned cold  (so very bloody cold!) his curls have been fairly limp and frizzy and tangly and his fringe has been in his eyes most of the time. I decided to trim his fringe which I've done heaps of times. Except he wouldn't sit still and it was uneven and looked funny. So he finally got the haircut his dad has been begging for. Now he looks like a little blonde Ginnifer Goodwin. I'm hoping I'll be able to talk his dad into letting his curls grow back for next Summer but that may be beyond my powers.

Tiny Tuesday - Chelsea Cheeseburger. Shopkins get really creepy.

 I haven't mentioned my Shopkins Happy Places house in a while. I've been waiting until I get my hands on all the new furniture sets, so I can get it done all at once. Unfortunately there is still one set I haven't been able to find anywhere and I'm still not quite desperate enough to spend forty dollars for it on ebay. Part of the problem seems to be every shop seems to still have a million of the bathroom sets from the first season, so they're not restocking. That's a slight exaggeration but we were recently at a Target that had three of last season's bedroom set, one of last season's kitchen set and FORTY-FIVE of last season's bathroom! When I first got the bathroom set, I did not like the doll that came with it. She was wearing a robe and had yellow bubbles in her hair. Why yellow? I don't know. The yellow bubbles really bug me. But now seeing how many of that set, with that doll are still in shops, probably never to be sold, I feel bad for that doll instead. My husband says that's weird.

Anyway, I couldn't wait to show this little doll. Chelsea Cheeseburger. She's one of the individually packaged dolls that comes with two accessories and she's super cute.

There is nothing to not like here! It's all wins! Brightly coloured, burger themed, sailorish dress - cute! Adorable hamburger hair accessory - cute! Screaming, red hair - cute! Pigtails - cute! Bright, red shoes - cute! The cold, dead eyes of a killer - Wait! What!? Ah, it seems Chelsea isn't so cute after all. Let's take a look at the back of her packaging . . .

It seems Chelsea Cheeseburger is off to the Puppy Parlour (aka loungeroom) to smile as she shares some tasty grilled treats with her Petkins (sentient furniture) friends! And what tasty treat is she sharing with her demonic coffee table and couch? Why that perky little cheeseburger that's smiling at her so trustingly in the photo above! Yay! Cannibalism!

Not quite so cute now!
Don't get me wrong, I still think these are absolutely adorable but there are so many details that just make me shake my head and wonder how they happened. Like how did anyone make up the story of Chelsea bringing a new friend along as a sacrifice to be eaten alive by her and her friends wasn't just disturbing?
It is funny though.