A TOTALLY GROOVY BIRTHDAY

With a little help from my daughter's dolls,
all my gifts were on display at my mother's.
Yep, lousy photo.  Took it with my phone
under bad lighting.

Okay, yes, I know I use that word way too much, but there are times when there is no word I can substitute for groovy.  There's a nuance that isn't there if I say "fun" or "cool" or "awesome."

I wrote after Christmas about how I received this groovy cool American Girl knock-off doll and had big plans for decorating her room (actually the top of a mission style cabinet) in true 70s fashion.  I did the doll bed in January.  After months of anticipation, my 8th 44th birthday finally arrived and with it the most groovy awesome gifts ever!  Some were asked for, some were surprises.  All were GROOVY!

I apologize now for the photos.  I'd like to blame it on my camera, but it's probably just my general incompetence.  Don't hold it against the girls...

In case you're wondering about the Double Mint twins on the left, my mom and sister had to purchase another knock-off doll to act as a mannequin for fittings.  The second from left is Echo.  Foghorn's Kit and Kainani dolls are on the right and were quickly stripped of their clothing after this photo shoot and given back to their owner.

Denim skirt by my mother.
Crocheted hat and sweater by my sister.

An American Girl promotion item from Wrigley
Field and ordered from eBay.  Of course she needed
a Cubs jersey.  Shorts by my mother.

Granny square poncho by my sister.
Jeans by my mother.

Funky fur hat, vest, and purse, as well
as crocheted purple pants by my sister.
Shirt and socks by my mother.

Echo in her new romper and bandana
showing off her green shag foot rug.

Remember those?!?  Echo's tape recorder and record
player.  My record player had Kaptain Kool and the Kongs
on it.

My sister did the tie-dyed shirt and leather
vest.  She wanted to give it Roger Daltrey
fringe but couldn't make it work.
The colors in the shirt remind me of the one
Joe Cocker wore at Woodstock.

Every girl needs a terrarium...and framed David Cassidy album cover.

My sister made the doll jewelry box, as well as the bling inside.

My sister crocheted the ultimate accessories - shag pillow
and rug.  And a chair in my hideously beautiful 70s colors!

Seat lifts for storage!  Perfect place for her to stash her
16 Magazines.

Crocheted doll dress by my sister.

Hooded cape sewn by my mother. 

Crocheted jacket, hat, and purse by my sister.

Socks by my mother.
Duct tape shoes by my sister.

I swear my sister had a shirt just like this
in 1972.  Dress by my mother.  Leather
bracelet (with name etched) from my sister.

Could it get groovier?  My sister crafted an owl necklace
for me and a matching one for my doll.  Oh, my!

Okay, these shoes just came from eBay, but I had a pair just
like them in the first grade!  I can still see myself in my plaid
uniform, flowered shoes, and Scooby Doo lunch box.

Yep, sometimes it pays to have crafty relatives.  You couldn't purchase groovy stuff like this at any price.

And for folks who are interested in whipping up some accessories for their own  daughters' dolls, here are some helpful links:

1)  Instructions for making the socks can be found at Karen Mom of Three's Craft blog here.

2)  Instructions for duct tape shoes can be found at Sew Adollable here and here.

3)  Instructions for the barrel chair can be found at Cobbler's Cabin here.

4)  Instructions for the t-shirt can be found at Second Chance Studio here.

5)  Many of the crocheted clothing items came from Crochet for Dolls:  25 Fun, Fabulous Outfits for 18-Inch Dolls by Nicky Epstein.

EVERY CHICK NEEDS A GROOVY PAD

When Echo, my faux-American Girl doll, entered my life on Christmas, I knew immediately what I would be receiving for my March birthday.  A doll that fab has to have a cool bedroom set to reside in and since I'm notoriously hard to buy for, I knew my family would be more than happy to let me pick out these accessories myself.  (Yes, this will be for my 44th birthday.  No, I don't think that's strange at all.  Well, maybe I think it's a little strange, but the 70s bits you can buy for this doll are so...so...groovy that I just don't care if I look like a freak with arrested development.)

Groovy, but...ouch!  The price!

While I'm willing to pay the relatively steep prices they want for the record player and tape recorder or the lunch box set, I bristled at the $125 they wanted for the doll bed.  Granted, it has those cool love beads hanging down, but I still thought there had to be a cheaper alternative.  A quick Google search and I found numerous sites with do-it-yourself American Girl beds that probably wouldn't have stretched my limited abilities with nails and carpenter's glue. 

Sitting at my mother's kitchen table having lunch, I glanced to my left and saw her collection of little pitchers on this battered, wooden two-shelf unit.  I immediately said, "I think that would just fit my doll."  I happened to have the doll with me (I was harassing my sister about making Echo a poncho) and sure enough, the shelf was just the right length for her to lie flat and just wide enough.  My mother graciously dumped her pitchers elsewhere and I carted it home. 

Marcia, Marcia Marcia!

I gave the thing a couple coats of white semi-gloss and then went in search of fabric.  My sister assumed I'd want it to be all Brady Bunch girls-inspired.  I've mentioned many (many, many) times that as a kid I was absolutely obsessed with having their bedroom.  Those funky 70s flowers on the wallpaper!  Ah, heaven!  However, Echo is going to reside most of the time in my family room and, most of the time, that room is decorated with my gorgeous retro decor in the avocado-tangerine-marigold color scheme.  I needed fabric that would scream 1972 but that didn't clash with the other chotchkies in the space.  We can't clash.  That would be tacky.

Hobby Lobby let me down, but I found just the thing at JoAnn's:

I knew I had a winner when I showed it to my mother and she literally recoiled from the pattern.  I was hoping to find fabric with owls, but anything with the birdy motif was either the wrong color or too nursery-oriented, or the owls were strange and bug-eyed and not groovy at all.  Mushrooms were almost as good.  And the fabric goes perfectly with my mushroom sign and my mushroom mug...

I'm not a fan of the sewing machine.  I can knit for hours on end, but put me in front that damn Singer and I'm ready to beat myself over the head with it.  I spent all of Friday evening, into the early hours of Saturday, working on the bedding.  Then I got up Saturday morning and spent another hour and a half tweaking it some more.  I have some OCD tendencies and like Monk the detective, I can't stand things that are crooked or asymetrical.  The canopy kept coming out uneven and the bedspread billowed out instead of draping nicely by the sides.  I finally solved the latter by just tucking the whole mess under the mattress.  It's not like the doll is really going to use the bed.  And, no, I don't intend to sit around playing with her.  Even as a child I wasn't wild about dolls.  Loved my stuffed animals, but dolls usually ended up with their heads shaved or on my dissecting table.  (I just had to know what the inner workings of Baby Alive looked like.)

I made quick work of the mattress by using four folded cloth diapers from the basement, formerly my children's burp cloths.  Much easier than trying to cut a piece of foam with an electric carving knife.  The pillow is just stuffed with a wad of fiberfill.

And the result?  Voila!

I'm a lousy photographer with a mediocre camera.  I swear it actually looks pretty cute.

Caught in the act.

I have to say I'm pretty pleased.  Even my sister admitted it looked better than she thought it would.  I mean, she thinks the fabric is horrendous and vomit-worthy, but it totally is the look she knew I was going for.  Unfortunately the doll and her bed reside on a long mission cabinet in the family room, just in front of this window-like opening that goes into the kitchen.  The cats frequently use the table as a springboard to leap through the window and I have this strange feeling they'll constantly bump that bed and ruin the symmetry of the fabric.  I'll probably spend half my life straightening the canopy and making sure there's equal white space showing on each side.  Thank God the motif in the fabric wasn't in straight lines or I'd need some new medication.

The only question now is the love beads.  Do I add them so that it more closely resembles the real thing or would adding beads to the wild fabric be overkill?  The one thing I don't want to be is tacky.

It's Not Kitty Carryall, But...

I have been coveting my daughter's American Girl doll.  Not the doll itself but the fact that there exists a 70s doll with such groovy accessories that I drool each time a catalog arrives.  My daughter has the 1930s Kit doll and Kanani, the doll of the year from Hawaii she picked out on our trip to the American Girl Store in Chicago.  They both sit on her dresser shelf.  I mean, they just sit there, gathering dust.  I thought that was a shame when I could easily change Kanani's name to Marcia Brady.  My daughter suddenly decided she liked her dolls when I showed a keen interest in one of them.  I had my mother sew a fab dress for "Marcia" from the material of one of Foghorn's toddler dresses (a gaudy flowered pattern Carol Brady would be proud of) and left the newly attired doll on the shelf.  It was less than an hour before Foghorn appeared downstairs, eyes full of fire and demanding to know what this was doing on Kanani.  I said, "Her name's not Kanani.  It's Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!  And she's mine."  That dress was whipped off so fast it was just a psychedelic blur and my hopes of taking over her doll were dashed.

I don't really want the 70s American Girl Doll.  I can think of lots of better things to do with $100.  I do, however, desperately want those accessories.  How I long to have that little record player and tape recorder and bed with the beads hanging around it and the tiny plastic terrarium.  If I can't live in the real Brady Bunch house, I want it in miniature.  Well, my yearning apparently was heard by Santa because on Christmas Eve my sister presented me with this little beauty:

She's an American Girl-sized knockoff from JoAnn's.  She has the long 70s hair and it's reddish, which I much prefer to the genuine blonde Julie doll.  The outfit was crocheted by my sister from a vintage pattern meant for a Barbie-sized doll.  This means my sister did math to adjust the pattern to fit my new toy.  You have to understand, my sister is a complete loss with numbers.  On several occasions she's attempted to open the wrong hotel room door because she got confused about the number to her own.  It's a kind of numerical dyslexia.  She also can't add or subtract easily, as evidenced by the befuddled look on her face when trying to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill.  Very similar to the expression I saw on a chimpanzee with a Rubic's Cube on Nova.  Anyway, she successfully redid the outfit and I'm only minorly miffed about the yarn.  No, I'm not bothered by the colors.  They are just, just...groovy.  My umbrage comes from where she acquired it.

Who wouldn't love these?

Every fall we celebrate Aunt Nancy Day (or now known as Uncle Chester Day).  In 2012 my mother and I took her to lunch and an excursion to the James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio.  As an extra little gift, I knit her a collection of dishcloths in the 70s avocado and tangerine colors that she loves loathes so much.  Yes, the gift was designed to make her scream and writhe in pain.  I thought about writing a blog post on "101 Ways to Torture Your 70s-Hating Sister" and this would have been in the top ten.  They were handmade, so her conscience wouldn't let her just throw them away.  They were, to her, too ugly to use.  So, they sat...for over a year...untouched and unloved.  Until she got the last minute, bright idea of the faux American Girl doll and quickly unraveled all my hard work to make my doll's dress.  I must say, though, the outfit is just...just...groovy.  Then again, so were the dishcloths.

The most obvious choice for a name for my doll would have been Marcia, of course, but some reason that didn't seem to fit.  I bounced around various other Brady Bunch or Partridge Family character names, but nothing was quite right.  She needed a hippy-sounding name.  The Mark Lindsay song "Arizona" kept going through my mind.  My sister asked about the name of the runaway in the Patridge Family episode where they sing "Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque," but it was something ordinary like Maggie.  Then I thought of David Cassidy singing "Echo Valley 26809" (with a brief flashback to the concert where he almost took my cellphone for the spoken portion of the song, but some other bimbo shoved her phone right under his nose while he was reaching for mine and ruined the whole thing...not that I'm bitter).   Foghorn is furious, but I think the name Echo totally suits this doll.  My daughter, may I mention, also hauled my doll around all Christmas Eve at her grandmother's, insisting it was hers.  Fat chance.  And I want my flower power dress back from Kanani.

Echo got her first accessory the day after Christmas when I sat down with Foghorn and her awesome Shrinky Dinks jewelry set full of yellow smiley faces and peace symbols and flowers.  I made my new best friend a necklace which says it all.

AMERICAN GIRL KNITTING

At Chicago's American Girl store.

Foghorn had one American Girl doll to start last summer (Kit, in her Depression-era garb) and for her birthday received Kanani, a Hawaiian-themed gal in a flowery tropical dress.  Grandma made all three of them matching sundresses in a mermaid-pattern last summer, which looked danged cute and the dolls have been wearing these dresses ever since.

The matching mermaid dresses.

It's now February and with the snow flurries blowing around out there, I have to say the dolls are starting to look a little chilly to me in their sleeveless frocks.  I've been wanting to graduate from knitting socks to knitting a garment a little more challenging, but I can't quite bring myself to start something big and ambitious like an adult sweater.  Instead, I decided to try my hand at doll clothing.  Complicated enough to stretch my abilities, yet easy and quick enough to not be quite so intimidating.

I made Kanani a matching outfit using leftover yarn from Foghorn's January socks.  It's the Serenity sock weight yarn with Deborah Norville's face on the wrapper in the "Spring Fling" color.  (I often wonder how a woman goes from being a journalist on the Today show to hawking yarn.)  Spring Fling made cute striped socks, so I thought it would add a little pop to an outfit.

The Eyelet Hem Skirt is a simple A-line design, super easy, and available for free on Ravelry here.  It has an elastic waist and cute picot edging.  This item was a breeze and I thought it came out pretty nice.

The Retro Cardi didn't work out so well.  I'm not sure if there's an error in the pattern or if I messed up in some way.  (I would think it was just me, but I noticed someone left a comment on the author's blog, asking about the same problem I was having.)  I had to make some adjustments, but I ultimately managed to salvage it.  It called for tiny 1/4" buttons and my mother had cute vintage pink ones, which go perfectly.  It's hard to see from the picture, but the front has a lovely cable-like design.  The pattern is free on Ravelry here.

I was a little afraid Foghorn might be so delighted she'd want a whole outfit for Kit as well.  Instead she annoyed me by barely glancing at Kainani and instead going on about how every other kid in her second grade class as an iPod Touch and why can't she have one, especially since The Professor has a Nook.  (The whole 7th grade class was just provided with Nooks, part of a technology pilot program, but this knowledge didn't make Foghorn any less indignant.)   She better watch it or I'll knit her a stinking iPod and make her really mad.


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