38 Facts About Reborns

Follow this link:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/38-facts-about-reborn-dolls

to read 38 facts about Reborns - and see darling photos!

Vera's Doll Stories

Our Customer Vera has been having fun creating stories with photos set in Philly! The photos are set in PHilly, not necessarily the stories. You'll enjoy recognizing the dolls!

Doll Devours Damsels Do

Chewing doll nearly consumes girl's hair (1996)

A battery-operated Cabbage Patch doll that can chew had to be taken apart piece by piece this week when it munched a 7-year-old girl's hair up to her scalp and would not let go.

Rothman Doll Show November 14th

http://www.jmkshows.com/dollshows.html

Follow the link above for more info on the Rothman Doll Show in Hackensack, NJ on November 14th from 10am to 4pm. Wilde Imagination and Doug James of CED will be there!

LGBT Doll Meet Up

Please join us for Philadelphia's first LGBT Doll Meet Up.

We will be holding monthly meetings on a Sunday from 1pm to 3pm at the
William Way LGBT Community Center 1315 Spruce Street
2nd Floor - The Community Room
right here in Philadelphia.
RSVP: 215-627-5790
heastore@aol.com

A Dollhouse Fit For a Queen

It was Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, who first thought 'on the impulse of the moment’ of asking her friend the renowned architect Edwin Lutyens to design a dolls’ house for Queen Mary, the consort of Marie Louise’s first cousin King George V. Queen Mary was an obsessive collector of objets d’art, most particularly of 'tiny craft’, and most passionately of those with a family connection, which she amassed with an acutely knowledgeable eye. There could be no better gift for her than a dolls’ house filled with diminutive treasures. What more suitable tribute, too, for the Queen’s steadfast presence throughout the Great War? With its English eccentricity, this miniature yet monumental scheme was spot-on to capture the world’s imagination.

The Queen’s Dolls’ House, which now belongs to Queen Mary’s granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II, is a creation unlike any other: an exquisite little building filled to its royal rafters with the work, in miniature, of the finest artists and artisans, craftsmen and manufacturers of early 20th-century Britain.

These were the years of post-war convalescence, when the largely unemployed nation needed help to stand on its feet again, in a country 'fit for heroes to live in’. In 1922 the British Empire Exhibition of Arts and Manufacturing, conceived to boost spirits and to stimulate trade, was given the go-ahead, and this tiny masterpiece of an English house, displaying the very best that the United Kingdom could offer, would be its centrepiece. So this remarkable creation, which could have become a mere plaything, a fantastical toy subsumed into the wealth of the Royal Collection, was to become instead a beacon of national importance. Indeed, within days of its inception it was seen as a flagship of endeavour to ease the nation’s woes.

Lutyens regularly began to hold what he called 'Dollyleuyah Dinners’, which would lead to more than 1,500 individuals becoming involved in the Dolls’ House. It was a formidable force: 250 craftsmen and manufacturers, 60 artist-decorators and 700 artists, 600 writers and 500 donors, many of them still household names today.

When Lutyens took on the Dolls’ House, he had been working on the building of New Delhi for nine years. It gave him particular pleasure to be simultaneously applying himself to 80 square miles of Imperial buildings and a house measuring 5ft high. Lutyens created lofty royal chambers along with mezzanine levels, and ensured that every room had a window, with either casement or real sliding sashes. From the outside, what initially appears to be a podium supporting the house is in fact the basement quarters. Let down rusticated stone flaps and reveal, to the north, the water tank and machinery for the lifts; to the south, the wine cellar and food stores. Most ingenious of all are the revelations in the great drawers at either end of the building. With the flaps pulled down, to the west you haul forth a fully fledged five-bay garage housing a fleet of royal limousines; while to the east, a garden by Gertrude Jekyll – empress of garden design in her day – leaps into life.

There can surely be few more splendid last salvos from Edwardian England than the decoration applied inside the house, with its woodwork, plasterwork and damask-hung walls; its superbly imaginative ceiling paintings; as well as the murals by such giants as William Nicholson and Edmund Dulac. There is a wealth of rich-hued marble. In a letter to Princess Marie Louise, Lutyens had wondered whether 'government would allow us to tap maharajahs for Dollyleuyah 1) Would the Queen mind? 2) Would the Viceroy?’ Whatever he eventually did, there is Indian marble on the walls, floors, door-cases, dados and ceilings, and fashioned into fireplaces which then decreed the decorative colour scheme of the rooms.

When the shell of the house was finished, it was moved (the wall of Lutyens’s office in Apple Tree Yard, St James’s, London, had to be torn down to get it out) to Lutyens’s house in Mansfield Street. There it was to stand, taking up half his drawing-room, for nearly two years. The elite of the nation’s talent poured through the door: Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) with his miniature painting of the King’s charger, Delhi; Alfred Dunhill (1872–1959) with his tiny cigarettes, cigars, pipes and tins of 'My Mixture’ – tobacco custom-made for the King. Ursula Ridley, Lutyens’s daughter, told me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) arriving with his diminutive, hand-written and leather-bound story How Watson Learned the Trick. Queen Mary, enjoying every development, came to Mansfield Street several times.

In 1924 the house was finished. 'The most perfect present that anyone could receive’, wrote the Queen to all those involved in its creation. During its seven months at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley the Dolls’ House was seen by 1,617,556 people. A year later, it was taken off again, in 45 boxes weighing four and a half tons, to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in west Kensington. Finally, in July 1925, it was put on show in Windsor Castle, in a room specially designed by Lutyens. There it has remained ever since.

You Great Big Beautiful Doll

VERNON HILLS, IL, October 18, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Chicago doll artist Cyndi Safstrom has been creating action figures of everyday people for the past three years. Just send good pictures of your loved one's face, and she can turn them into a doll, display box included. The face is sculpted from polymer clay, then integrated in to an 11" doll body. Add the clothing of your choice and you have a unique and personalized gift that will be a huge hit on Christmas morning.

When Ms. Safstrom created an action figure of a fellow YouTuber for his birthday in 2007, she didn't expect it to turn into a new career. "I had lost my corporate job earlier in the year. Zipster08 put up a YouTube video showing off his doll, and the orders started coming in."For the first year, YouTubers kept Cyndi busy making action figures. Surprisingly, most of her business came from men wanting figures of themselves.

In early 2008 she created a website and opened her talents to the rest of the world.Be A Doll has now shipped personal dolls/action figures all over the world, mainly as gifts for wives, husbands, parents, siblings, and friends. "I love doing something creative for a living and helping people express their love for each other."Be A Doll creates 11" dolls of real people like YOU. Action figures for everyday heroes.See samples of our work at http://www.be-a-doll.com, or email beadoll55@aol.com.