20 Comments

  1. I love the illustration style! 🙂
    and oh how I loved paper dolls when I was little. Yes, they were 1980’s Holly Hobby paper dolls, but they were fun!

    • I love the illustration style!

      It’s a distinctive look, isn’t it? If I were an artist, I’d know the technical terms with which to describe it. But that early-60s style is easily recognizable, even to this untrained eye. (And lol, Holly Hobby is its 80s equivalent.)

  2. So my era! The short dresses frilled with crinoline-slips. My older sister wore half-crinolines and hoops to make her skirts bell. Love Grandma’s house with its tower! Today Grandma wears pant suits and Reeboks and lives in a condo. She is on a cruise to Aruba on Easter.

    • Betsy McCall was all about projecting an iconic (fresh-scrubbed) image. Grandma’s fairy-tale house fit right in! 🙂

      I wore fussy, short dresses like that to church–typically hand-me-downs, but still. But I never owned a crinoline slip, thank goodness.

  3. That’s beaut! I loved paper dolls as a kid, and still do love making them. (I made my dad a Garibaldi paper doll once, because he was interested in him.)

    Now I’d like to make some paper dolls…

    • I loved paper dolls, too. My nana saved them for us, which was really nice, because they’re perfectly suited for traveling, which we so often did.

      I wanna see pics of those paper dolls, if you decide to make them. 🙂

  4. Those crinolines were so unflattering. I had a dress made for my brother’s Bar Mitzvah with crinolines that made me look pudgy when I really was slim.

    • Thanks, Jeannine! It’s so much easier to hunt for Easter eggs in flip-flops and jeans.

      I’m wishing you — all my Peeps — a Happy Easter, too!

  6. Love Betsy McCall! My mother subscribed to a magazine which featured Betsy every month. I also loved paper dolls and once had a Betsy McCall doll (real, not paper) with hair that you could curl with tiny rollers.

    Have a lovely Easter!

    • McCall’s magazine, right? My Nana clipped them from her magazines every month, and it was such a treat to play with them at her house.

      Happy Easter to you, too, Jama. Do you bake/cook any special treats over the Easter holidays?

  7. I have a box of paper dolls back at the folks’…my Betsy McCalls, and my mom’s Blondies and Katy Keene (I think), and her mom’s Blondies, cut out of the Sunday funnies.

    Thanks for the rememberies. 🙂

      • It’s tempting, but they’re so old and brittle now. But amazing…there are downloadable and printable ones online. Hey, there’s Gloria! I forgot about her! She’s in the box.

        Gloria on Flickr

        • That Gloria’s a vixen, isn’t she?

          Maybe since they’re brittle, you could frame some of your favorites? If you do a museum mount, you can preserve them from further decay…

  8. I haven’t thought about paper dolls in quite some time, but this brought back some memories (including accidentally tearing the little fold-down tabs. oops)

    • Ha, I did that, too! So sad, especially since we didn’t have scotch tape.

      Sure was fun to play make-believe with Betsy McCall & her ever-expanding wardrobe…

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