Raggedy Ann
She was raggedy by the time my mother handed her down to me. Her mustard dress, which could easily have been made from remnants of my southern granny’s curtains, was peppered with little black daisy flowers. Her loops of red yarn hair were littered with pearls of fuzz, and the white muslin her face had been embroidered onto had become a dingy gray. I wish I could hold her now and gingerly run my fingers over the rickrack on her dress.
She didn’t have muffled cries reverberate from within a plastic frame when I squeezed her hand, and she didn’t wet herself. She didn’t sprout hair from holes in her head as I moved her arm up and down like a ratchet from my dad’s tool chest. She couldn’t play in the bathtub with me, while my sisters and I used Avon roll-on soap to draw red and blue smiley faces on our bellies. Her large stitched round eyes stayed open in permanent surprise; they didn’t open and close when I tipped her back and forth on the swing set. I couldn’t even change her shoes; they were permanently sewn to her feet over her red and white striped stockings.
There wasn’t a string you could pull out from her back to make her talk or a place to insert batteries so that she could walk, but she was portable and soft. She came from a time where make-believe and magic wasn’t bought, it was made.
I would include her in ring-around-the-Rosie, my hand holding one of her little padded hands, and my sister holding the other, and when we all fell down, we would exhale with a giggle and look up at the sky and squint against the sun and smile.
front view
back view
detail shot of front
detail shot of front
These are the Christmas cards that I created for the most active members of In My Vintage Room Yahoo group. I made four of each design. I printed the vintage images off of a Luna Girl clip art CD onto matte presentation paper. I embellished the images with small stick-on gems, various colors of Stickles, as well as a clear stardust Gelly Roll pen. Each image was cut out and matted onto red shimmer paper which I then cut with scallop decorative edge scissors before I adhered it to a card base. I'm pleased with how elegant and festive they turned out to be and I know the girls will appreciate them. (In return I received more hand-made cards this Christmas than I have ever gotten before and they are lovely. I am so lucky to have such wonderful and talented friends!)
I made this bookmark back in November for Fran's In My Vintage Room Yahoo Group Bookmark Exchange. When she proposed this project I went right to the web for inspiration and stumbled across this awesome website which has the history of bookmarks as well as bookmarks through the ages and across the world. My vintage lady peeks at you from over the pages. The rest of the bookmark ended up being too plain; with more time I would have liked to fashion the "body" of the bookmark to look like her body with a pretty dress. 