Birthday rebellion

 I have started an Instagram for my dolls. If you're on Instagram it's poppyandthegiant. I'll still be posting her as much as I ever have (which is NEVER as much as I mean to) but will probably update that more often. . . Unless I forget it exists, which happened with my old doll Instagram and now I can't even remember how to log into it! Sigh. I plan to do better this time!

 I still don't have a doll room. In fact I've started making this face whenever the subject is raised.

So this week, in a fit of rebellion, I unpacked a bunch of dolls and did this on our loungeroom shelves. . .

It's not finished yet. There's a few things that shouldn't be there (like the witches), I don't know what I'm doing with the chair and there's a space next to the Wellie Wisher for a special girl, that's coming in the post.
 Having them out is making me plan things. But whether or not those things happen is going to depend on whether or not I can find my fabric stash before I burn out on the idea.

 Yesterday was my birthday. I didn't want much. We've gotten so much new stuff over the last few months already. I did get two Our Generation sets. An outfit with a scooter and a sewing machine set. Unfortunately I can't show you because I forgot to take pictures and they're currently somewhere in this chaos!

The doll I have coming, is a doll I've always dreamed of having but never expected to get. I bought from my doll savings as a birthday present to myself and hopefully she'll be here soon, so I can show you.

*UPDATE*

Here she is!

An 18 inch Ann Estelle! Unfortunately the lady I bought her off, forgot to send her glasses. Will have to see if I can sort that out but I'm not sure I even mind. The same lady has a whole bunch of 18 inch Ann Estelle in EBay! I have wanted one of these for years but when they were available, I had no money and buying stuff internationally was complicated. I never thought I would find one, in Australia on the secondary market! I haven't had a really thorough look at her yet but she has real heft to her! Clearly Tonner quality vinyl and clothes, an adorable face and some of the most beautiful doll eyes I have seen! Now I count the seconds for the kids to go to sleep, so I can have a real proper look at her!

Playing

Wanted to share a video of the kids playing together today. But couldn't work out how to, not even sure if you can do that on blogger. And too tired to try to figure it out.
So here's some pictures I took during the same game instead.

Tiny

 Tiny is seven months old today. It feels like forever, and like five minutes at the same time. This week she's finally sleeping through the night, kind of. (She wakes up between eleven and one for a feed. If I'm lucky the Giant Husband is still up and takes care of it.)
 She is the happiest baby I know. She smiles and laughs all day, although we have recently discovered she can cry like an air raid siren if she's hurt herself.
 She can crawl now. And sit up for a while, especially if she has something to hold on to. At the moment she spends most of her time trying to stand up, and falling over.
 I'm making ninety per cent of her food. Not because I'm naturally that kind of person. But because when the Giant Baby was toward the end of his baby food days, I discovered that almost all baby food if it's fruit, is pear, if it's vegetable is sweet potatoes. This wouldn't bother me if it said that clearly on the package.  But it never does. The pack will say "Pineapple, orange and pear" but if you read the ingredients, in teeny weeny print, it turns out it's 99% pear with half a teaspoon each of pineapple and orange JUICE. I don't like that. It's hard to explain why. If the pack said "Pear with a little pineapple and orange juice", it wouldn't bother me. But the trickiness makes me not trust commercial baby food. And I'm pretty sure that was terrible English.
Anyway, baby picture spam. (It's way too early in the morning for stringing words together.)

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And some pictures of her new bedroom because while it's not fantastic or Pinterest worthy, I love it. And I'm really pleased with how well it came out given how little money we spent. Just try to ignore the washing line in the background.

Limbo

 So when we moved into the new house, I knew it wasn't all ready. I'd been told the two back bedrooms (which will be my doll/craft/sewing room and the Giant Husband's "Office" - a weird name for a room that will be used for playing computer games and watching Star Trek) needed painting. What the Giant Husband had "forgotten" to tell me was they were both full of junk that the owners were storing there. The kid's bathroom and the laundry also both needed painting and we're still full of someone else's stuff. The dining room still needed painting and had someone else's enormous dining table in it. The en suite had a shower that didn't quite work and the towel rail was in pieces on the counter.
Ugh.
I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
A LOT of progress has been made since then. But it is happening SLOWLY  Now the back hallway still needs painting and the two back bedrooms are half cleared out for painting. Otherwise it's all done (I'm not going to mention the large amount of crap that isn't mine in the backyard that I really want to go away) but a lot of stuff was supposed to go in those two rooms, and will eventually, but for the moment they're still in boxes in our room and our wardrobe. Including my dolls and my paints.

I managed to dig out enough sewing stuff to finish these two pinafore, I started before Tiny was even born.

I wish they were an inch or two longer but I'm not sure if I can fix that without making them look awful.

I'm also making Tiny a dress out of this fabric

It matches my coffee cups

And my keyring

Other than that it's chaos here. Tiny started crawling the week we moved in. Now she's using the furniture to stand up . . . And fall over backwards, most of the time. And going through that phase, all babies go through, where they look like that bad guy from The Princess Bride.

The Giant Baby is having more difficulty. He wants to be a grown up. He's jealous of his sister. He's not sleeping. He's tired all the time. He's terrified if bugs and spiders - which are things he's never really had to deal with before. He's lonely. And he's bored.

And I've fallen in love with Spotlight. Spotlight is a shop. I've always thought of them as a sewing shop. And I've never really gone there because they just weren't convenient to my old house. But they have EVERYTHING! Sewing stuff, craft stuff, party stuff, kitchen stuff, bed linen, towels and random household stuff. A lot of the stuff I wanted for the new house, I got there (actually from their online shop) because they had sales on and I could get good quality stuff for Kmart prices! I have a feeling that's where all my money is going to go for the foreseeable future!

One question I had when we moved was "Will we be out of bushfire land now?" And that finally got answered this weekend. Nope. Nope. Nope. (Although since we're in the middle of a housing estate, it'd be pretty tragic already if our place was burnt.)

Hopefully I'll be able to get to more fun stuff to talk about soon. If not you'll just get more rambling periodically.

Vintage kids clothes

 Something different today. Some vintage toddler clothes. Once upon a time I collected vintage clothes. Most of what I had, more or less fit me but has since been given away. These things were overlooked, because they weren't kept in the same place and I completely forgot I had them.

 I found these in a Salvation Army shop. They hung on the wall for weeks. Originally there were three little dresses and a coat and every time I went in, I admired them, but I never thought about buying them. That is until one day, one of the dresses was gone. I thought it was heartbreaking that these little dresses that looked like they'd been together for decades were being seperated, so I bought what was left, just to make sure they stayed together.

This first dress, is blue nylon with silver lace and soucatache trim. It's labelled as being Spinney brand, which I know nothing about but googling the name shows lots of clothing advertisements from the 60s and 70s. It's  size 20, assuming that's the chest measurement in inches, that's about a size 2 by my estimation. Somewhere I have a matching hair ribbon or sash. That sounds vague but it seems to thick and huge to be a hair ribbon for a two year old, so that doesn't make sense. But the dress has an attached sash, so another one makes no sense either.

It looks like something is missing from the bodice. Bows maybe? I like the idea of bluebirds there for some reason.

This second dress, with cute little embroidered toadstools, is labelled "Rio Frocks by Betta Bonnets". The grand sum of information I've been able to find out about this label is that Betta Bonnets was an Australian company, that ceased trading in 1978.

But this dress has a cute little matching bonnet.

And a patch of discolouration on the front that I wouldn't be brave enough to try to remove, even if I knew how.

Next is this gorgeous, cherry red coat.

I don't think the fur trim is real? Unless maybe it's from some kind of wild felt teddy bear? But I can't really say for certain. The back of my brain suggests it's Australian but I'm not even a hundred percent sure what that is so wouldn't bet on it.

This one is labelled J.Oshlack. I couldn't find any trace of that company at all.

But I have two favourite things about this coat. The first is the intricate labelling to create the right shape on the back. I can't imagine any company bothering with that these days.

The other thing is that the collars are separate! The actual coat looks like this

But then there are three extra collars. A matching cape collar. A soft, lacy knitted collar. And a weird little fur collar.

They can be worn in various combinations, or left off altogether. The red one clearly belongs to the coat. The coat has little buttons under it's collar to button it on.
The little, creamy, lace collar, really looks too perfect to be home made, but I prefer to think it was the handiwork of some clever, loving mother or grandmother.
The fur collar is clearly commercially produced. It's tagged "Made in Japan" and even has creepy, little animal heads attached.

To top it all off, there's a (filthy) nylon parasol.

That's all for now.