Doll-A-Day 268: Soft Doll Week: Cabbage Patch Kid

  This week we're looking at soft dolls, dolls with stuffed bodies, and sometimes stuffed heads and limbs too. Today's doll is this Cabbage Patch Kid.

She's the only stuffed Cabbage Patch Kid I own, although I do confess to owning a couple of the red haired vinyl ones, and a slew of the miniature stuffed ones...and some of the PVC figures. Gee. I've got more Cabbage Patch dolls than I thought!

This particular doll is one I got second hand, as I do most of my dolls. Like all Cabbage Patch dolls, she would have come with an adoption certificate with her name on it. I don't know what her name was, so I call her Effie.

Effie was probably naked when I got her, but in any case, she wasn't wearing this outfit. I picked it out for her. I felt this was a school dress,and I also gave Effie some glasses, since she was so studious.

And white tights because her legs were cold...

I wish her arms would stay in another position.

I like Effie's dark red hair, freckles, and teeth.

We did once came across a Cabbage Patch doll in a store whose name was 'something' Colvin. Colvin is my maiden name. (And my current name. I kept it and just added Ken's on. As I told him,"It's me. It's who I am. And I've been me longer than you've been you." : I'm 11 months older than Ken.) It's also one you don't come across very often. I would have loved to have bought little 'something' Colvin, but we didn't.

Cabbage Patch dolls became a certified craze in the fall of 1983, when demand for the recently released dolls, and their accompanying scarcity, sent people into a frenzy worse than the Tickle Me Elmo mania of 1996.
I thought the dolls were cute when they first came out, earlier in 1983. I kept looking at them at the K-Mart my Dad and I used to live behind. I liked them so much I picked out one, (a red haired one, of course!), for Unsentimental Niece, who was almost 7 at the time. It was in layaway when all the fuss started.
  Unbeknownst to me, Unsentimental Niece would have preferred a bald one, which would probably have been my second choice anyway. Her mother, who was on a limited budget, made her a homemade baldy, using the very similar heads you could buy for making your own 'Kids'. Unsentimental Niece always resented the poor guy because he wasn't a 'real' Cabbage Patch kid. (But he was special because her mother made him for her. She didn't see the logic behind this idea.)In the long run it hardly matters, since she is "Unsentimental Niece", and sold all her childhood dolls when she was was barely into her teens anyway.I guess I see her point though about the bald doll. I always hated that my parents never got what I asked for, because what they got was 'good enough'.(Yeah, because a foam rubber Andy and a Raggedy Gretel are just like Raggedy Ann and Andy. Right?)
  Check in tomorrow for another soft doll.