Firstly I hope you liked young Robert Alexander posing as a shepherd on today's Advent Calendar page! Poor Georgie and baby Clarissa though..............................
I have been reminiscing..........with particular emphasis on the dolls that came from my mother's Welsh display cabinet in order to live in St. Hils. There is one in particular who has a special place and that is Emily! Emily, I feel, had quite a life BEFORE she came to St. Hils. To explain....................my sister, Catherine, of Dollshouse Heaven used to love sitting Emily in her corner shop. This is not any old shop but actually a hardware shop. You can see it in its full glory here...................
Catherine, if I am correct, modelled it on a similar scene she had seen at the Black Country Living Museum. She is very keen on social history and it has very much fed her interest in miniatures as she attempts to recreate scenes from the past. It is Catherine who made me aware that carrots in Tudor times were PURPLE and not orange and she even provided me with a purple carrot colour wheel for one of my Harvest Festival pages in order to add a unique splash to the occasion.
Sadly you can't see the stool that Emily sat on whilst she was living there. For anyone wondering.........yes..........Catherine DID place ALL those wooden boards on the wall individually!
So far Catherine has created a war time cafe just after a bomb has struck and an up and coming idea is an Andersen shelter.....again an idea taken from the Black Country Living Museum.
This shop, which has a living room upstairs, was one of Catherine's earlier projects. The upstairs living room is permanently set up for Christmas..........with paper chains, presents around the fireplace ........festive food made especially for the occasion by Catherine herself...........Our late mother, Hilary, REFUSED to let Catherine EVER take the Christmas decorations down whilst she was alive so even to this day............the upper room in the corner shop is all ready for Christmas Day....................... Although on that issue I have a small confession because Catherine allowed me to raid it in order to put my Advent Calendar together.....so many of the extra presents on some of our Advent Calendar pages are courtesy of Catherine's corner shop.......thanks Catherine!
You can see the upper living room below on the day I "borrowed" some presents....oh yes AND a couple of Christmas cards you also see on my Advent Calendar..................but BEFORE I vandalised it.............Note also the Tudor style wooden beams in the ceiling........all executed by Catherine herself MOST ably....
Catherine even wrote a story around Emily and the corner shop too...............and it is Catherine who named her..........well of course. It is also Catherine who spelt out her character to me and I can almost quote her here as she told me, when she passed her over to me....... that Emily "is a complete tomboy who, when not attending church, would rather be up a tree!" We both liked that idea for Emily because it explained away something rather unfortunate..........................................see below for the worst case scenario when photographing poor Emily............and before you ask - I have NO idea how things got to this stage of untidiness.............
As you can well imagine - this photo, which was taken for the page featuring the children completing a lesson by Miss Lorna Webb on the topic of Pentecost,...........NEVER saw the light of day..............well ...until today of course!
As you all will have gathered......the issue of her awful untidy hair was no issue to me at all.......it just added more fun to the story............talk about the poor girl having been dragged through a bush backwards.....Emily certainly qualified for that one poor girl!
However as with all things.............life NEVER stands till and so it was that one day whilst posing Emily the inevitable happened and horror or horrors.........I dropped her and by some awful accident she lost half of one of her legs. Now I KNOW that I make great play of how accidents give birth to new storylines......but after this particular accident I was completely at sea......after all HOW do we pose Emily with only half of one leg?
All was well after a word with Jane Davies, who made Emily originally. She agreed to take poor Emily back to her home and, because she no longer used the kind of body Emily had, gave her a NEW body. However Emily not only was bestowed with a new body......but a NEW hairstyle too..................see how she looked on her return.......and imagine the surprise of her Sunday School friends when they saw their pal looking SO tidy with her hair all brushed and with a ribbon.......
It is quite a while now since the above photo has seen the light of day on St. Hils website................but with so much going on I have to make hard decisions from time to time as to what to keep and what to delete.......and as it gets bigger the decisions get bigger..................
I love here how you can almost immediately see that Emily has not changed one bit because the jar of tadpoles is rather tell tale isn't it? So she is STILL a tomboy, albeit a "tidy" one (for now?!), as she shows off her newly caught tadpoles to her friend, Priscilla Jane! Again no prizes for guessing who made the tadpoles (some still for sale on her website...) ........well my sister Catherine of course.....
Well - that is all for now.....................but DO remember to keep checking out our Advent Calendar as each day unfolds.............there are still a few surprises to come too............................cos the children and congregation have been pretty creative this year with their Advent calendar......................
Till the next time
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I would love to hear your genuine comments about my blog........any ideas for new greetings cards.........storylines......you name it I am glad to hear it!