Dolls and Doll-related Items for Sale

Monday, September 16, 2019

A Doll Blogger in the Making

I just got the opportunity to scan these photos, and they make me smile to see how I might very well have been a doll blogger if there was internet back then. I was very careful in my layouts, and of course I had to frame the picture properly when I took it, as there wasn't easy access to photo cropping tools back then either. These pictures are from January 1986, when I was 17 years old, and a senior in high school.

Here my Cabbage Patch doll is ready for bed. I wrote on the back of the photo that she was "6 months," so I must have received her for my 17th birthday in 1985.
And here she is seated at a desk down in our basement. It was an old-fashioned desk, with two seats, although the front seat did not have a desk. It looked rather like American Girl Samantha's school desk, with the wrought iron and everything, but ours had the extra seat in front. I'm pretty sure that's a real apple on the desk.
Here's a picture of Samantha's desk, when American Girl was still making nice stuff (did I say that out loud?) I got this from the American Girl Wiki page, but this is obviously a AG sales photograph, and not a personal one.
My sisters and I loved to play "old-fashioned" school with our desk. We especially enjoyed playing Little House on the Prairie school. The Samantha Parkington doll was released for the first time in 1986. How I would have loved the desk set even more if I had owned a Samantha!!

16 comments:

  1. Did AG make nice stuff once? Sad how far they've fallen, innut? I do believe you are a natural at blogging, given these images!

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    1. Awww, thank you!

      Oh my goodness, when American Girl was still Pleasant Company, they made such *beautiful* accessories for the dolls. Unfortunately, I was raising two little girls at the time, and didn't have a lot of discretionary income.

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  2. That's pretty cool. I don't think I would have had the patience for taking photos in the days when you had to wait to develop them to see if they were any good.
    But the best part of Cabbage Patch Kids was the awesomely, out of date, names they came with! And you never told us your girl's name!

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    1. Not having patience to wait for your photos was why 1-hour photo developing became a thing. But picture developing days span most of my life! Now I feel old. ;)

      I don't remember all of my doll's name, as I changed it to something that I liked better. I do remember one of her names was Patience, though.

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  3. Nice photos. I never thought of taking photos of my dolls until the digital era. I mostly had Barbie dolls growing up, and some of my playtime adventures were based on movies I had watched or books I had read. I think that, nowadays, any type of play time that doesn't involve videogames is considered "old fashioned".
    Take care.

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    1. My family was pretty big on photography, and I had a camera of my own. I took lots of pictures of things that I enjoyed.

      My sisters and I liked playing Little House on the Prairie and Little Women. I don't know if you've ever heard about LHotP, although LW has been made into several movies. LHotP was a series of books about a girl's experiences growing up on the frontier of the US, from the 1860s into the 1880s.

      I think my niece still likes some dolls, and she really isn't into videogames, so that's good.

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    2. I do know Little Women and Little House on the Praire. I'm more familiar with Little Women because of the movie with Winona Ryder, they put it on the spanish public TV every single year around Christmas time. Home Alone and Die Hard are also two Christmas classics.

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    3. I guessed that you would know Little Women, but I wasn't sure about Little House on the Prairie.

      Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.

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  4. This is great. You definitely had the doll blogging spirit in you at an early age :-). I also felt like I played with dolls for a really long time like through high school with my twin sister. I didn't really have many larger dolls, but we were really into Barbie at the time. I don't remember getting any new Barbies after the age of 13 or so but we definitely played with the ones we had through our senior year, and I remember we did a Barbie doll fashion show for a film/video class I took in 11th grade LOL.

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    1. Cabbage Patch kids were the hot new toy right about the time that I got mine, which is why I think I had it. That Barbie doll fashion show sounds like a lot of fun. I think I would have loved doing a project like that!

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  5. Now this really is a trip down memory lane for us oldies Barb. How lovely that you still have the photos, so many get lost or misplace, I know I have very little from my childhood. Love that little desk, do you still have yours?
    Big hugs,
    X

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    1. Xanadu, I have so many photos from when I was young, plus all the ones my dad took. Believe it or not, that desk isn't little; it's an actual full-sized antique. It belonged to my mom, so it's probably at my sister's house now, unless they got rid of it. I was just using the AG desk because that seemed the fastest way to find a picture of what it looked like.

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  6. You CB is looks right at home. I remember when my when my girls were teens I used to dress my CB and put them around the house! I enjoy your blogging!

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  7. What a cutie doll. I am a generation before the Cabbage Patch Dolls but I certainly know about them.

    I wish I had photos of my childhood dolls, well photos of me holding them.

    I still have my Chatty Cathy and my Kissy and my Barbie (which I think was the third style created).

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    1. It's nice that you still have your childhood dolls. I have some of mine, but none of our old Barbies. Then again, those were the cheap ones from the 70s, for the most part.

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