Sunday 17 October 2010

Paper pleasures

I wonder whether any girls today play with paper dolls. Why would they when they have Teletubbies or whatever they have these days. Shame because it is such fun with paper dolls. I made some for the oldest granddaughter when she was five and visited in San Diego. She was delighted and packed them carefully to take home to Sweden. She had never seen a paper doll before.

When I was young, every girl with self respect had dozens of paper dolls and boxes upon boxes of clothes. Sometimes dolls could be found inside chocolate bar wrappers, but mostly we would draw them, copy the best from each other and make all those clothes with tabs to fold over the doll. There was scope for imagination! All the clothes that we couldn't even dream of we gave to our paper dolls. We never had problems with keeping us busy on rainy days - long, long time ago, before computers and videos, almost before television (there was one channel, with children's hour at six).

The reason I indulge in these idyllic memories is that one of the dollhouse magazines I bought yesterday has cutouts of Victorian paper dolls. It surely kept me busy this evening. (But I think I deserve it, after a day of personal-statement writing - see my previous post).

2 comments:

Clémentine Beauvais said...

Oh I played with paper dolls a lot when I was little! My mum used to buy stacks of those booklets and I cut them out and played with them for ages. There were some vintagey ones, like 1950's costumes, and also some Empire-style ones and also huge crinoline dresses but they didn't fit very well because they were much bigger than the models so the little paper straps weren't strong enough to hold them into place... and I had whole boxes of male dolls and children as well and even a few dogs with tiny costumes!
Where can we find these now?

Tata said...

Where can we find these now?

http://www.thetoymaker.com/Toypages/53Paperdolls/53Paperdolls.html

http://www.stardoll.com/en/

www.paperdollheaven.com/

Yes, girls play with them ,and there are many more . Just google it.