Dolls

Do you have a book that sort of shaped your life? Some people might have a children's book that they loved to hear read to them, or maybe the first book they read and realized that they loved to read. Well, this is mine!

I was waaaaayy into dolls when I was young (who am I kidding? I still am!) and loved dollhouses especially. When we first moved to Chico when I was like 8 we lived across the street from an older lady named Mabel. Mabel had a short, tight perm and was a retired seamstress who wore cut off polyester pants and sleeveless button up tops that I'm sure she had either made herself or altered. She had a little poodle dog that she carried everywhere with her, and this was long before that was a fashionable thing to do. She had loooong fingernails and smoked long cigarettes. She was fond of saying "If you've got it, flaunt it baby!". Needless to say she made an impression on me. The best thing to me, though, was her dollhouse. She had it set up in the front bedroom in her house and it was HUGE - like the whole wall of the room it seemed like. I coveted that dollhouse. It was completely furnished and I loved to play with it. I don't actually remember if there were dolls, but I'm sure there must have been. We moved after that to another house and my mom and I would always go to the library during the summer and this was a book that I would check out and renew and renew. It is the best ever! It's got like a little story on how this doll family came to be, and patterns and instructions to make all the dolls and their clothes.

I didn't quite get the how-to's for the clothes but I sure did improvise! I made a whole little city of dolls - I remember that sometimes I would pretend that they were tired of their hair color and I'd give them new yarn, or maybe they wanted a perm so I'd unravel the yarn. I had drawn all the faces on, so if one didn't come out perfectly I'd sew a little patch over the face and re-draw it. I discovered that this could also be like a facelift if one of my dolls was particularly vain, or maybe they didn't like the size of their nose. I had a blast doing this, and everything was by hand, as you can see they are pretty rough. I made pets for them, and little houses that I would decorate. The houses were in crates that my mom had given me. Currently they are in a box, i dragged a few out for this pic. I was laughing as I was taking the pics because their clothes are so - I guess primitive would be a good word? I was more concerned with having some sort of covering than details. The book has great patterns for clothes but they were definitely from a different era and mine are clearly 80's!

Anyways, I have been looking for this book for ages. I couldn't really remember the name so that made it a little tricky, but finally a google search turned up the right book! I bought it from Amazon for next to nothing - the shipping cost more than the book. But, really, the memories are priceless to me, and the book is so familiar because I had pored over it endlessly when I was young :)