Saturday, April 19, 2008

ROUND ROBIN PHOTO CHALLENGE -- Variety ShowThis













ROUND ROBIN PHOTO CHALLENGE -- Variety Show


This was a very fun Round Robin Photo Challenge for me, and easier than some, because I had a number of items that I could have used. I have a variety of counted cross-stitched items but a lot of them are put away in a trunk and I didn't know quite how I would display and photograph them. I have a few seashells from the Oregon coast and had intended to buy more while out there earlier this week but I didn't think of it while there, or go to the kinds of gift shops that carried them. My biggest collection of items consists of dolls I bought a number of years ago. They are in my spare room and not easy to access, but I was able to get several pictures of some of the dolls. I call them Emily's (my sole granddaughter's) inheritance. ;-) (But only if she wants them.)

The story of my doll collection is that I was hooked for a while on the Home Shopping Network about 10 years ago and they had a lot of dolls for sale. I had just lost my husband a couple of years before to leukemia and for some reason the pretty little doll faces and clothes appealed to me tremendously. I was told by someone who is qualified to know that I was acting out of grief. Now when I look at them, I kind of wonder why I bought them. I guess I have moved on. Anyway, here are pictures of the dolls. (You may want to click on them to see them bigger at my Flickr site.)

Doll collection 1

Doll collection 3

Doll collection 2

The one poor doll in the background of the last shot seems to be losing her hair.

At the time I bought the dolls, I also thought they might be valuable someday, and certainly that was a selling point on the HSN shows where they were sold. I don't even know if dolls are sold on that channel any more because I am unable to get it. I have kept the boxes the dolls came in, up in the loft in my garage, but I imagine they are homes for mice now. (I had heard that the dolls that retained the most value were those kept in mint condition, in the boxes they came in, but I always wanted to look at the dolls, thinking they were pretty, rather then leave them boxed.)

My attraction to the dolls may go back to my childhood, too, as I was a child who looked at the dolls I was given and admired their lovely features rather than played with them. My grandparents (Mom's parents) gave me a set of beautiful dolls of foreign lands that I kept up on a shelf in my bedroom. While I was outside playing, my sister, Jo, who is 4 years younger than me and preferred to play with dolls, got into all of my dolls, especially the foreign ones, and messed them up. My complaints to my mother fell on deaf ears. (Don't get me wrong; I love my sister dearly, and now that we are a lot older, I would gladly give her any of the dolls she wanted!) Maybe in buying these dolls as an adult, I was making up for that time in my childhood where I was unable to enjoy my pretty dolls in the way I preferred -- by looking at them and admiring them. But this amateur psychoanalysis is all speculation . . . although it does let you get to know me better. ;-)

As for the way this collection fits the theme, the variety of dolls here was fun. There is a Scottish lass, a little school girl with round glasses, plus there are many with varying old-fashioned styles of dresses and hats or head decorations. They all came with their own stands and so are arranged in no particular order on what was once a built-in train table for my husband's train set when he was growing up. Once when my mother was here and stayed in the room, she took one look at the doll set and her single word was, "Pretty!" And that's what they are -- a source of feminine beauty that somehow has brought me joy and satisfaction, and I think that's what I must have ultimately wanted from them.

To find links to the other participants in the Round Robin Photo Challenge and see what these ingenious bloggers have come up with, head on over to the site here.

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