A Tale of Autumn and Dawn's Apartment

  Here we are in the last week of December already! The year has passed so quickly. I missed my usual battle with the leaf sucker truck this year. I started raking my leaves and the rake wore all the skin off my thumb! By the time my thumb was better and I could rake again and had a chance, almost all the leaves had blown away. (We had a very windy Autumn!) I should have raked that narrow strip of wind tunnel I call a side yard, but it wasn't that bad when I had raked the front yard. Then I totally forgot about it, and by the time I got the chance to get out there again It was past leaf sucker season. I'll just have to rake up the side yard and leave it in the cans for the yard waste people in the Spring.
  In spite of my raking fail I am ahead of most things this Christmas season. (I celebrate Christmas, so that's the season it is to me. You're welcome to call it whatever it is to you, and I am not offended.) I had almost all my shopping done and everything I had wrapped before December began. I have never been that far ahead. However, I haven't got my tree up yet! Hopefully this week at some point.
  This weekend Ivy and Emma and I are going to the Holiday do at Malabar Farm. Malabar Farm was the home of writer,conservationist, and farmer Louis Bromfield, and is still exactly as it was when the family lived there in the 1950's. For the holidays the farm house is decorated with 1940's and 50's Christmas decorations, and you can wander through on a self tour and enjoy cookies and hot cider. I love that place. It's just like going back in time.I could move in now and live there.
  The other night I was trying to rescue some pictures off our old computer, and I found some pictures of things that I don't have any more. A couple of them were things you don't see very often, so I thought I'd give you a look at them.
   The first one is Topper's Dawn's Apartment.

I borrowed this picture of the box, and the ones of boxed sets below from the internet so I could show you. I will be pleased to remove them if asked.

  Here's the set I used to have...

 It was made for Topper by Amsco, specifically for Topper's Dawn doll, but to be honest, it's way too big for Dawn and friends.

Thanks to a reader's comment, I now know that the little things sitting on the lazy Susan are the finials for the top of the canopy posts. That makes sense, because without them there is nothing holding the canopy on. Plus you can see them on the box cover. I hadn't seen the box picture when I took the photos, but I should have figured that one out!

There's a reason for that though.Topper was either lazy, or too cheap to design Dawn a set of her own...

  ...because this is just Penny Brite's stuff in a different colour!

   Penny was also produced by Topper/Deluxe Reading, but while Penny was 8" tall, Dawn only made it as far as 6 1/2" tall. Plus Penny was a completely different scale, so she was quite a bit heftier than Dawn. Dawn was just too tiny not to look awkward with this stuff.

I have seen pictures of Dawn and friends sitting on these chairs. Their feet don't come anywhere near the floor and the chairs are way too wide for them.

The set is made of thin cheap looking plastic. Still, it has held up all these years.

That kettle could hold about half of Dawn's body.

And Dawn is only about half as long as this bed. I guess that would be ok if she were supposed to be a kid, but she's not. On the other hand, Penny is supposed to be a kid, and the bed fits her. (But then Penny runs a hair salon and drives a car. Topper was just playing with our minds!) 

I'm hoping Dawn was at least tall enough to see herself in that mirror. As you can see from the edge of the bed, the furniture parts came on one of those plastic frames and had to be snapped off and put together. The little holes on the vanity are for the lamps, which are missing.

I bought this set pretty cheaply because the person selling it didn't know what it was and had it generically labelled. When I bought it I thought it was the Penny Brite one. I had only seen the real Penny one, and I assumed it came in various colours. Much later I found out what it was. By then, I also had passed it on to someone else and mislabeled it! So I'm paying the world back by educating you guys now.