Happy 58th Birthday to Me!

  Tuesday is my birthday. Yesterday Emma and I went to Detroit to see They Might Be Giants. Still good after all these years. We got back very late, and I didn't have my key. Emma had asked if I had my key, and I said no, that Ken would have to let me in. So she pulled away, very tired and anxious to get home herself. ken's always up late,so I just ring the bell and he lets me in. Well last night,since he's been sick the last week or so, he went to bed! He was upstairs sleeping soundly,and couldn't hear me ringing the bell,pounding on the door,even banging on the sides of the house. I used one of my clothes line poles to bang on the house as far up as I could,under the bedroom window. But Ken is a sound sleeper,and he didn't hear a thing. There's a phone next to the bed,so I thought I could call him and wake him up. BUT I DON'T HAVE A CELL PHONE. I know. Everybody in the universe, including school children, has a cell phone,except me. That's just the way it is. So I had to walk somewhere to find a phone. It was almost 2:30 in the morning,so the corner gas station on the next block was closed. I was thinking I was going to have to walk all the way to the 24 hour Kroger (grocery store), but then I remembered the hospital was on the way. Surely they would let me use a phone. Luckily they have a phone they let the public use, and I called Ken. He woke up. Story short: I got home and got in. Finally.
   Since Tammy World represents me as a child, it's her birthday too.
  Tammy World is helping her mom, Dolly, bake her cake. And yes, Dolly does have a stand mixer on the counter and a hand mixer on the table. I have my mom's old 1950's stand mixer,but I also have a hand mixer.

Mom! I got all the stuff out!

I don't have a doll sized flour or sugar, so just pretend those have already been used and set aside.

Tammy and little brother Gareth are waiting to 'lick the beaters',as we always said. These days they warn you not to eat cake batter because of the raw eggs. We still do it though. I haven't died yet. Of course, there's 'a first time for everything'. In this case it would also be the last time.

  My mom almost always made cake from scratch,but for my birthday I always asked for a cherry cake, from a mix, that had little cherry bits in it. With that I had to have peppermint ice cream. Now I'd much rather have chocolate cake like the one I make for Ken's birthday. Best cake in the world and so sweet nobody except me can eat a whole piece! Of course, I'm not supposed to eat chocolate any more!

Tammy: Can I help when it gets to the good part?

Dolly: Which part is that?  Tammy: The part where you use the mixer and the cake stuff goes flying all over the kitchen.

Dolly: That isn't normally a part of baking a cake.

Tammy: You could have fooled me!

Dolly: Well...let's add the eggs.

The eggs are a fridge magnet,but they are way more to scale than the supposedly 1/6 scale eggs I have. I just wish there wasn't a giant magnet lump on the lid. The milk is one of those rubber things like the rubber fit together sushi and stuff you can buy. Maybe it's an eraser?

Dolly: Do you want to stir a bit? Tammy: Yes, please.

Dolly: Make sure you get all the dry part mixed in.

  I never helped my mom make a cake. I'm not sure she would even have let me. We were always told we couldn't do anything right. When Mom made pies she would always give us some pie crust dough to make something out of. That involved nothing more than adding sugar and cinnamon. The results were not good, but then, I have to admit,neither was Mom's pie crust.
  While Tammy is stirring, Gareth spills her glass of milk.

Gareth: I'm sorry!  Tammy: You big doofus! Look at the mess you made!

 Dolly: It's ok! We'll clean it up.

  You know how it is when you're little and things just don't go how you meant them to.

Tammy: Don't cry Gareth. I'm sorry I called you a doofus.

  In our house, I was the littlest. My sister would have reacted a lot like Tammy if I had done that. Of course, Mom would have started yelling,"Gom Gom Gom! That's all you do is gom!" 'Gom' meant making a mess. I was 'always gomming up the place'. Mom and Dad were from Kentucky and I guess that was a phrase there, in the 'olden days' at least.
  I didn't make a new birthday cake for Tammy World this year. You can see the 1/6 scale one Ivy made a few years ago HERE, and the one I made HERE .

My Newest Dollhouse

  Yesterday Ken and I went shopping for Easter goodies. When your kids are grown it gets harder to find little gifts,and I'm trying to cut down on the sweets. Also, when they are earning their own money they can buy sweets any time they want to,so it requires finding things that are unique, that they might not find or necessarily buy for themselves. Anyway, while we were out we stopped at a couple of Goodwills,because that's what I do. At one of them I found this cool thing.
 

 

It was the amazing price of $2.99,so I said "Having!"  Ken whined about it,but I pointed out how it's my birthday month now, so he had to acquiesce.
  I think it must have just been some kind of decorative thing originally. Fuzz and I both noticed how it appears there were originally side pieces that slid in and out on the little tracks at the bottom. 

They aren't there now though, and whoever owned it wallpapered the walls. They must have used it as a dollhouse.
  It's an odd size though. The outside door and window/balcony are pretty much 1/12 scale.

Unfortunately the doors don't open. They're stuck on the outside. I'm thinking maybe I could remove them, cut them in two pieces,cut out a hole for them,and add hinges.

But the inside is almost 1/6 scale. The rooms are about 10 inches tall.

  It was a bit dirty, and the wall paper was coming out. So I cleaned it and removed the paper.
 

Kind of a shame because the downstairs had this nice paper with some pretty nice chickens on it. I saved it and cleaned it and maybe I can reuse it,or at least the border.

I was lucky that it was fairly nice out today. It wasn't very chilly. I got the house cleaned and the sky looked a bit overcast. Just to be on the safe side I didn't wait for it to dry out a bit first, but, instead, brought it straight inside. Almost as soon as I get it in the house, the rain came.  
  There is a broken spot on one side. 

That piece was resin. I'm hoping I can use some mold maker stuff I have to mold a new piece from resin. You can buy that in liquid form at craft stores,I think.
  So this is what I've been doing.

Doll Book of the Month Club: "Puss in Boots" and Shiba Productions

    This month's Doll Book of the Month Club entry is a childhood book of mine. It's "Puss and Boots".

  This "Puss and Boots" was published by Golden Press in 1967,and features beautiful puppet illustrations.

   You'll have to excuse the condition of the book. This is the worst condition of any of my childhood books. Normally I was very OCD about my books. Most of them look unread because I took such good care of them. (My mom even told me that,as a baby, I would sit propped with pillows,being too young to sit alone,in my playpen,and look at my books, gently turning the pages, and I never tore one.) In second grade my teacher made us write our names in all of the books we got on Scholastic book order delivery day. I HATED that. I didn't want to write in my books. I tried not doing it,but when I couldn't get away with that,I wrote my name as lightly as I could,with plans of erasing it when I got home. I do still have some with my name in them though. But this book started to peel, and I'm obsessive about that too! I love to peel things. When I peeled the plastic covering off the cover of this book, I enjoyed it, and hated myself for doing it. I managed to stop myself before I completely killed it, but it's pretty bad.
   The book has a beautiful lenticular,or 3-D picture on the cover.  The picture appears to move when the book is moved or viewed from different angles.

  The first time I showed this book to Emma when she was very small, she looked at the cover in breathless amazement, her eyes large, and finally asked me, "How do you get the toys out?" After that the book became known, not as "Puss in Boots", but, "How Do You Get the Toys Out".
  The book is the familiar story of Puss, the boot wearing cat, who manages to make his master, a poor miller's son, rich. (When the Miller died he left his mill to his eldest son, his donkey to his middle son, and all our hero got was the cat. In the end, I bet the other brothers felt cheated.) 

The master ends up marrying the princess and everyone lives happily ever after...

Although the princess doesn't look too thrilled.

 

  'Everyone' that is, except the rich ogre.(When my mom read it to me when I was a kid, she mispronounced 'ogre', and, instead, read to me about the mean orgy'. Of course, as a kid I didn't know what that meant. Obviously, neither did Mom.) 

The mean 'orgy'. I remember setting up what I thought at the time was a very accurate recreation of this setting, using a ceramic planter of flowers I had as a little kid. That's the only part I can remember, so I don't know what I used as the grass, the stairs, the ogre, or Puss. The ceramic planter was an almost exact duplicate of the ogre's, but I'm sure the rest wasn't nearly so accurate as I remember!

Puss tricks the ogre into turning himself into a mouse and Puss eats him. So basically Puss murders the guy and steals his lands and castle for the miller's son. Nice lesson kids.

  There were several Golden Press books in this series, including "The Little Mermaid", "The Wild Swans", "Thumbelina", "Rumpelstiltskin", The Little Tin Soldier",("The Steadfast Tin Soldier"), and "The Snow Queen". The Golden Press books were made by Shiba Productions, and while there were many other children's books with puppet illustration, they can't hold a candle to the Golden Press/Shiba books. The Golden Press books are well written, beautifully worded stories with illustrations of such detail and colour, with beautifully made puppets.
  Shiba Productions was the name of an animation studio that created quite a few of the puppet illustrated books, known as Living Storybooks, as well as puppet based animation for commercials and print ads. It was formed in 1958 by Tadasu Iizawa, Shigeru Hijikata, and puppet maker Kihachiro Kawamoto. Kawamoto, who handmade all the puppets, set up the tableaus, and photographed them, was also an animator, and he later became a very successful filmmaker. You can see loads of his stop motion puppet films on YouTube HERE.
  Kawamoto described the puppets as “actors within the books.”  And there is a lot of life in his puppets and his posing of them. I think my favourite picture in the book is the one of Puss being threatened by the ogre-turned-lion.

Why does the ogre have a jar of pearls on a table?

It's a great picture, even if it is the one picture in the book where there's a visible wire. 

You can see it just behind Puss's ear.

  There is a very detailed post on the Shiba Productions books, which you can read HERE.
  There were a lot of other puppet illustrated Living Storybooks, and some, at least, were Shiba Productions, and some were the same guys without the Shiba name.

This one even has a lenticular cover.

No mention of  Kihachiro Kawamoto, so this must have had a different puppet maker. It looks like it. These puppets and their costumes aren't nearly as detailed as the Golden Press books'.

This is a different edition of the same book, without a lenticular cover. Inside it's the same story and illustrations.

Same shag carpet grass as Puss in Boots though!

Some of the other books available. Notice it says they have been approved for 'simple text'. The writing in the Golden Press books is more flowery. Hey look! Grosset & Dunlap was a Filmways presentation Darling! (Sorry. Too much "Green Acres"!)

Yep! Pictures without the third guy!

I want this puppet! I wonder where they all are now?

  That's the doll book for the month. See you soon.

Play Sets: The Bratz Lifestyle Krazy Kool Retro Cafe

  It's another cold,snowy day! After Sunday was so warm and sunny,and Monday was cold and rainy,the past two or three days have been snowy and the temperature has been in the 20's and 30's,(Fahrenheit). I;m inside with a warm cat on my leg,and my hands are freezing!
  This month's play set in our 'Play sets' series is the Bratz Lifestyle Krazy Kool Retro Cafe. (I feel lucky they didn't spell it 'Kafe'.)

This set is pretty popular with people who do 1/6 dioramas because it's pretty...dare I say it? 'Kool'. It has that red/black and white checked retro look,and looks a lot more realistic than Barbie stuff.

These are the three large pieces.

Unfortunately the jukebox is just a hollow shell. Replace it with the Hanna Montana working jukebox. It doesn't match this set, and is still too skinny, but it lights up and plays music.

None of the cupboards open.

There were some nice accessories that came with it too. I don't have them all. There was the coffee maker,which had two coffee pots,one with a black handle/spout and one with a red handle.

  The coffee pots have a sort of rubbery feel to them. They don't feel smooth and plastic-like.  There is also a blender. I have another blender,but I'm figuring this is the pitcher to the Bratz set because this one feels rubbery like the coffee pot. I don't have the right base to it. It has a pointy bottom, so it can't sit on it's own,or fit into most of the bases of the doll sized blenders.

  The set also includes three silver plastic trays. These don't feel rubbery.

There were also three rubbery feeling white plastic plates...

... food for them,two plain white plastic mugs...

Also rubbery,hence the lint.

...one rubbery parfait glass...

...one ketchup bottle and one mustard bottle,and a computer monitor that is white with a plain blue screen.

Here's what the set looked like in box.

    The mugs are a really good 1/6 scale. Most Barbie mugs are actually a little small. These are a bit bigger than the gift store ceramic mugs I have. (I showed you the ones I 'customized' for Fuzz and Ivy.)

Ceramic on the right, Bratz on the left.

   That's the play set for this month. See you in a day or two for the next Doll Book of the Month Club entry.