Easter

Wishing all my blog followers a very happy and peaceful Easter and many thanks for your continuing support and encouragement.

I just love the Sasha dolls and so enjoy photographing and sharing them here with you and am always interested to read the comments about what you like or don’t like about the dolls themselves, their outfits or my photos. Keeps me on my toes and and my mind active.

This is the very first time that my Sasha Brood have ever had their very own personalised Thornton’s egg and are looking forward to cracking it open and sharing it amongst themselves later on.

Today I have chosen just two of my Sasha girls (to save time and make life a little easier for me as have had a busy week) to model some of my Easter themed and yellow coloured dresses.

Firstly my 1960s crude eyed Gotz girl is wearing the 2012 Festival dress that I won on the Children’s Fund Auction.

It is beautifully made by Tina Gross and I had wanted to own one of her unique dresses for many years so you can imagine my delight when I realised that I had won it. The outfit also came with this small white felt bag with a little yellow chicken inside.

I have teamed it with some yellow JJ sandals that I had specially asked Jean to make up for me in this colour and commercially made socks in ercu.

This is one of my favourite of my early Gotz dolls.

This limited edition Ruthsdoll’s smocked seersucker dress is an Easter present to myself. It has been on my ‘wish list’ for several years now so I decided that I had better get it before it became discontinued altogether.

It is being worn by my 1968 Fringe girl with the trimmed hair and teamed with commercially made pale yellow bar shoes and white Dayzee’s? socks.

This next photo is one of my favourite poses in this post.

I love, inspite of her cut short fringe, the way her hair lies/falls in the side view photos like this.

This next photo of a little chicken emerging out of an egg reminds me of the time that my daughter hatched two ducklings and five chickens in our home in an incubator as part of her Biology A level project.

It was a truely wonderful experience watching them hatch out and I remember having to be continually feeding them with porridge and scrambled eggs as they were greedy little things. The excitement as they smelt it coming to be being put into their cage, scrambling over, or rather in some cases trampling down, each other to get to it first.  They were very messy eaters sending the food all over the place as they tried to gobble it all up before anyone else.

A quick change now into one of Jill Mackley’s ‘Three Bear’ themed smocked dresses in Jill’s very own pattern and design.

Jill’s piping and smocking seen in close up below is always equiste and so excepionally neat.

She has kept on JJ deep yellow sandals and Dayzee’s socks and the attractive yellow wooden jointed bear that can be seen with her was a gift from Carolyn Campbell many years ago.

Such a pity though that her fringe had been cut so short and bluntly so that apart from a fringe re-root, there’s not a lot that can be done to improve it.

After a few days the tiny chickens and two ducklings were allowed out  and put into a pen on the lawn during the daytime.

Another of Jill’s ‘yellow themed’ dresses, this time in a paler yellow colour with a sweet ‘bumble-bee’ print on it.

Again her equisite piping and smocking on the yoke,

 I have added my new Boneka navy T bar shoes for the footwear here but which sadly my hands wouldn’t allow me to do up at the time, so my apologies for this.

Unfortunately all of the photos in this blog post have had to be taken indoors as the bitter wind was still raging outside and the girls refused to model them in the cold with the short sleeved/sleeveless dresses being made from Summer weight cotton materials. Brrrrr! I certainly didn’t blame them as I’m still in my Winter fleeces!

Another basic smock styled very pretty dress in pale lemon is seen next.

I’m not sure who made it or from where I originally purchased it. I have teamed it here with commercially made shoes and socks.

It is made from Broaderie Anglais material (and could, from the looks of things’ have perhaps done with a petticoat underneath.)

(Pity that the collar very slightly overlaps!)

My daughter’s two little ducklings were introduced to water and swimmimng via a children’s paddling pool and it was lovely to see them waddling freely around the lawn along with the little chickens…. all following my daughter who they obviously thought was their mother.

The next outfit is by Ruth Briggs of ‘Daisy, Daisy’ ….though another seamstress unfortunately no longer trading.

Ruth had a very distinctive style when it came to designing and making her outfits (dresses, ballet and gypsy outfits in particular) though her dresses like the style here had one delightful thing in common…..

….sewn into the hem of the dress at the back is a little bell that delightfully tinkles as the doll is dressed or moved.

I was lucky enough to first meet Ruth at one of Anne-Marie’s Sasha fundays…. and then again at a later one of Dawn Law’s. On our first meeting I asked her if she could make the dress above and this one below specially for me.

Ruth used to be a be-spoke wedding and bridesmaid’s seamstress before turning to making Sasha Doll outfits and amongst my Sasha wardrobe is a beautiful bridemaid’s dress in cream slubbed silk which shows off her wonderful previous work.

I chose the materials from some samples that she had bought with her. Her outfits all come in a fine white organza bag that does up at the front with a daisy flower as a trade mark of ‘Daisy, Daisy.’

The dresses are just slightly longer than I would normally buy for my dolls but Ruth’s three models were the 80s limited editions, Velvet, Pintucks and Kiltie and they were/are almost two and a half centimetres taller than my earlier dolls.

Ruth’s drresses are/were beautifully made and finished and have real working button holes down the front opening and like Jill Mackley, Ruth does equisite piping.)

 MUST have an Easter Bunny or else it wouldn’t be Easter!

Next we have one of my early Trendon babies in a pretty Easter yellow floral dress by Maz.

She is a little boy in reality but I think makes a very pretty girl with her gorgeous eye painting with those little flicks.

Unfortunately our Daffodils here in Cheshire are only about 15cms above the ground and only just coming into bud due to this prolonged cold spell.

Keeping with the Easter theme of yellow, eggs, chickens, ducks, rabbits and Daffs another of my Trendon baby boys in a sweet Dollydoodle duckling sleepsuit and holding a dear little knitted and patchwork/button trimmed chicken that Paula Moreton (Plum) sent the Brood last year.

Kissy-kissy! I just LOVE you!

Below is a rather attractive oil sketch of a chicken.

One of my 1969/70 Quirky Trendon baby girls wearing a Dollydoodle pink/grey rabbit printed sleepsuit enjoying a little sniff of MY Thornton’s chocolate Easter egg.

Does this say MY name on it?

After keeping the ducklings and chicks for a fortnight we then took them to a nearby farm as planned but we were very sad to see them go…. but it was costing me a small fortune to feed them on that diet.

Another of my early Trendon baby boys in one of Dollydoodles little fleeces and Ruthsdoll’s knitted leggings holding my Easter treat from one of my brothers! I am extremely fond of Ferrero Rocher!

The babies will all be sharing these Cadbury’s mini Easter eggs later after breakfast.

Plus they have some mini Lindt and MaltEaster bunnies that James, Susan Bulgar Pomeroy’s youngest son, has so very kindly sent them. They are all saying ‘Thank you very much, James, and Happy Easter!’

Love the way these eggs have been created! Wonder if they are made of stiff icing sugar and so are edible?

This is a sweet and dear looking little soul paiently waiting for his Easter goodies and wearing the Dollydoodle Easter sleepsuit that I bought last year.

He is delighted to be given one of James’ Lindt little bunnies. Thank you James. I love him.

He will be allowed to have one of these mini eggs too.

What a lucky little chappie he is!

Thought that I had better include Quirky in the post too so here he is clutching the dear little lamb that Susan Bulger Pomeroy gave the babies last year.

And looking longingly at the candy eggs that Sarah and Cleo Price sent to them.

These are some plastic eggs that I used to fill with little gifts and use for an Easter Egg hunt for the younger nephews and nieces in our family.

This photo is a lovely reminder of the Easters ‘when I was young’ when mother told us that eggs boiled on Easter Sunday always came out coloured, like these seen below, as they were magical  eggs. (Of course we never knew that she added dye to the water when she was boiling them. (How lovely and full of wonderful surprises our life was in those days.)

I hope that you have enjoyed this extended Easter filled blog post. I still have a few more photos to include in a short post for tomorrow but unfortunately will be giving be blogging next Sunday a miss as it’s my birthday and my daughter will be up for five days, when hopefully we’ll be ‘out and about’ plus having our family and friends and her school friends visiting.

Again have a very happy day with hopefully a chocolate Easter egg, or two, to nibble on throughout the day.