A Girl For All Time Matilda For Only $60, But Only For The Next 33 Hours!

  The Kickstarter campaign at A Girl For All Time has only 33 hours left. If you pledge 60 pounds, which is about $57 US, you can get Matilda, the first doll AGFAT produced.

Matilda is Your Tudor Girl. She has a beautiful velvet Tudor era dress and a key necklace.She also has one of those interesting  A Girl For All  Time faces.

  I have A Girl For All Time Clementine,(You can read her review HERE.) and have seen Matilda at Pollock's toy shop in  Covent Garden. (You can read about that excursion HERE.) These dolls are more beautiful in person. They have wonderful faces and their vinyl is super smooth. Everything about them is well made.(And no, I do not get paid for these endorsements!)
  Time is running out so I wanted to let anybody who wants to take advantage know about the offer before it's too late. I believe the deadline is midnight Friday, April 15th. I'm not sure if that's British or American time. British time is 5 hours ahead of us. (As we are often reminded when trying to coordinate a time to call the sister in laws!)

A Girl For All Time Kickstarter Campaign For Your Modern Girl is Nearing It's End

  Just a reminder to those interested in A Girl for All Time dolls, that the Kickstarter campaign for the new Your Modern Girl has only 6 days left and they are only half way to their goal. So if any of you have plans to contribute, now is the time! To read more and see some pictures of the intended dolls, click the link to A Girl For All Time above, or go to my earlier post about the Kickstarter campaign HERE.

Surprise! Guess What Came By FedEx Today! Hello Maru!

  When I got up today my lingering cold had given me a voice like Broderick Crawford. But the weather was warmish, I was able to hang my laundry out to partially dry before it started to rain, my pear tree and lilacs are budding, the 100 or so hostas I transplanted last year from the yard of a neighbor who didn't want them are starting to come up, (My black thumb hasn't managed to kill them!), and a package arrived from----believe it or not---Maru and Friends!
  That's right. Maru and Friends,the same company that hasn't communicated with me since January,when they said they were going to send a doll for review.The company I'd given up on when they still didn't respond when I said I'd give up on them if I didn't hear from them by March 30th. So, thanks to Maru and Company. I want to do the doll justice in my review, so I'll need a few days to get my review together.Tomorrow I'm going to be busy baking a birthday cake for my son's 21st birthday, and trying to spend a little time with him despite his work schedule. Watch for the review, coming soon.

A Review of Maru and Friends Dolls---NOT!

 UPDATE: As of April 6th I have received Maru. Full review coming soon.(Thank you, Maritza.) I still don't know why I got no response at all from the company.The package was shipped a few days after this post appeared.I don't like to think Maritza felt blackmailed. I was only telling what happened to me.I told her when I would be giving up in case she wanted to respond, not to force her to do anything.

  Regular readers may know that I have had various Maru and Friends dolls, (Especially Savannah), on my Christmas list for the last two years.

Savannah

I love the faces on the Maru dolls.All of the dolls except one are sculpted by Dianna Effner, so they have those beautiful children's faces.

Maru

The one doll not sculpted by Effner is Valentina.

Valentina.She's supposed to be Maru's little sister, but she looks older and unrelated. 

 She's sculpted by Maya Bill. She's not as cute and sweet looking as the Effner sculpted dolls, but she has an interesting face, and I like her.
   I still don't own one of these dolls though, and now I may not. But I came very close recently.
  This SHOULD have been a review of a Maru and Friends doll. I recently decided to try to help keep the blog up to date and interesting by asking a variety of doll companies if they would be interested in providing products for review on the blog. One of the companies I contacted was Maru and Friends. I messaged them on their Facebook page.Less than 2 hours after messaging them I received this reply:

Welcome to the world of Maru. Yes... we would love to obtain a review from you. Send me all your contact information and I will get a doll right out to you. Thanks so much! maritza

  I was excited, So I immediately sent them my mailing address, offered to send them links to previous reviews, and told them that, if they were checking out the blog, my most recent post was not about dolls,due to my bird's death. And I waited for the doll to arrive.
  And I waited.By February 22  I still hadn't received anything.Did they need my blog stats? They hadn't asked for them, but when I had contacted A Girl For All Time for the same purpose I was asked for my blog stats.To make sure, I sent them this Facebook message:

Hi, Just following up on our last messages to see if there is anything else you need from me. If there is, please let me know. I'm looking forward to receiving your doll! Thanks again. Tammy

 I know that at some point I sent them an email through their website asking them to let me know when the doll had been shipped so I could watch for it's delivery, because we often get mail delivered to our side steps where we don't look for it. The steps are basically on the sidewalk, so anybody walking by could just carry a package off. In addition,if things get delivered there on a rainy day and we don't notice it,they can be damaged.(Like today when our photo book from Shutterfly got delivered out there in the rain.) No response to that either.
  By March 16th I had received neither a doll, nor a message from Maru and Friends on Facebook or by email. So I sent them one more Facebook message and one more message on their web page, both telling them that if I hadn't heard from them by March 30th, (A full two weeks after my previous message.), I would assume they were not sending a doll and I would post what should have been my review without the doll to review.
  At this point you may be thinking, 'they have every right not to send a doll', which is true.If they had never answered me at all, or if they had answered and declined to provide anything for review, I would have been fine with that.Even if they had contacted me and said they had checked out the blog and had changed their minds about sending a doll,I would have been a bit hurt and offended, but that would be their prerogative. But they committed to sending a doll. Then they reneged on their offer, and didn't even respond to messages. If this is what their communication is like,and if they don't carry through on their word, I'm not sure I'd even want to order a doll from them now, How are they on responding to customer problems or complaints? Do they ignore the messages, or do their message links just not work? Either way they aren't going to have very good customer service.
  And that's my story.Pretty disappointing, isn't it?

A Girl For All Time: Your Modern Girl Kickstarter Campaign

  In case some of you haven't heard, A Girl For All Time is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to finance a couple of new dolls. The new line is called "Your Modern Girl", and includes Maya,a member of the Marchmont family, like the previous dolls made by the company...

...and Maya's friend, Nisha. Nisha is the first doll produced by A Girl For All Time who is not a member of the Marchmont family.

  Maya looks to be made from the Matilda head sculpt,and is practically identical except for her hair style.

Matilda's picture from A Girl For All Time's website...

Nisha seems to be made from the Lydia sculpt, but doesn't resemble Lydia nearly as much as Maya resembles Matilda, due to her darker skin tone and brown eyes.

...And Lydia's.

There will be a whole line of clothes and accessories made available to go along with the new line. You can check out the Kickstarter campaign HERE.The campaign offers a few goodies in exchange for your pledge, which add up as the amount of your pledge goes up.
  Some of you will remember that I bought a Clementine doll from A Girl For All Time a while back. (You can read her review HERE.)

 I love Clementine and would love to eventually add other dolls from the line to my collection. I think they are beautiful play dolls, made from a wonderful smooth vinyl, and their clothes feature quality fabrics and construction.

 I also like the fact that the dolls have a backstory. There is a book to accompany each doll, telling her story. The books have gorgeous colour covers,and black and white illustrations.
  For those of you interested in the process that takes a doll from idea to design to completion, there are pictures and details on Maya and Nisha's creation on the Kickstarter page. The campaign ends on April 16th, so you have almost 3 weeks if you're interested in taking part. For those of you who aren't familiar with Kickstarter, if the goal of the fundraiser isn't met the dolls will not be produced, at least not at this time. So if you've fallen in love with the photos of Maya and/or Nisha, you'd better hop on it and pledge! 

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everybody!

 I know I promised a report on my birthday gifts, but I wanted to take some outdoor shots and the weather hasn't been cooperating. We have had rain, cold, and even some snow and frost. My poor daffodils are still not open. I do, however, have some baby tomato plants starting, and some of my amaryllis' are almost ready to bloom. On top of the weather, I, along with Ken and Ivy, have had a bad cold that's been lingering on for about 3 weeks now,and some sort of eye thing that has had me waking up with my eyes glued shut! They have been blurry throughout the day too. And to top everything off, our basement flooded about 6 weeks ago, and our water heater still doesn't want to re-light. So we've been abusing Emma's hospitality to take showers, and boiling water to do dishes. Either the water heater is going to dry out enough eventually to restart, (To be fair, it was under a foot and a half of water for about a week.), or we are going to need a new water heater. When our basement flooded a couple of years ago during the hot summer, it took a week or more for it to dry out, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt with the weather being so cold, (And so the basement is cold too.), that it will take a bit longer this time.

Whoo Hoo! It's My Birthday!

Since I've used the same mini cake for the last two years I thought I'd change this year. Ivy made this one when I made the other one. It's pretty good. No candles though. 'Tammy' is still 10 or 11 years old, just like me,(on the inside)!

Today is my 54th birthday. And what does a 54 year old woman get for her birthday? Well, I don't know yet. I had a lot of things on my wish list. (Quite literally. My Ebay Wish List.) What Ken bought from that list remains to be seen. He likes to make me wait for my gifts, so I won't know until later today. So I'll let you know in a few days. I'm already sure he spoiled me.