Flea market

Don't you love flea markets?
I am someone who loves flea markets.
There are people's scratched up videocassettes of The Little Mermaid and extensive collections of nail polish and stained stuffed animals and the boxes of "new" packaged stuff. Flyswatters! Socks! Knockoff brands of Sharpie markers! (They write the brand name in the weird cursive Sharpie font so you don't notice until you've payed your dollar fifty for them--you've actually just bought some Skerples or Shoupies instead! Surprise!)
It's not actually any of that stuff I really love about flea markets. The best part is the old stuff. The actual old stuff. It's once you've walked past the possibly-pirated DVDs  and broken Tiffany lamps and the weird stuff like underwear in giant packs and deodorant displayed on tables. (Why...?)
But once you have you can find the true interesting things. Old skeleton keys. Ancient crates of Coca-Cola bottles with sticky brown soda still inside. Written-on postcards.
And I was able to find, among some other very old things including someone's report card from 1936 (I will definitely be sharing that later), a color-in paper doll book--$2 instead of $10 because I wasn't a collector! Yesss!!

What I love so much about this paper doll book is they have these handwritten descriptions of what the dresses looked like in real life so you can color it in accurately. How could you not get excited about getting to paint "a white chiffon dress with cranberry, blue green, and lavender splashes of color"????

Princess Caroline definitely did have some snazzy outfits. Although I admit sometimes I was dying to change up the color scheme, particularly for the "brown blazer, ecru blouse, and tan skirt" which I hoped looked better in real life than my rendition of it.

 Fun, right?!

I hope everyone goes to a flea market and finds themselves some nice paper dolls to color in. Sometimes it's nice to have some instructions to follow. 

Although it would be pretty funny to have given the Princess a new stupid modern shirt. Like 

I ♥ 1D

or something with Angrybirds.

Paper Dolls!!!!!

This is Nadia.

This is Tamora.

Both of them live happily in origami paper land.

I created Nadia and Tamora (named after two authors I like) months ago, along with their clothing, and since then I've been keeping them in a converse shoebox. (Actually, the shoebox isn't really the most convenient place to keep them, but I like the sound of keeping something in a converse shoebox. ^ ^ yeah.)

For each of them I made a set of clothes--eight outfits.

NADIA!

TAMORA!

These were so much fun for me to make. So much fun, because I was basically creating things that I want to wear. (Tamora's purple bunny rabbit shirt? Totally want it!)
     Since I had never made paper dolls before, I made all kinds of mess-ups: the mistake of having hair hang over shoulders and dresses that puff out but still have tabs on the sides, so they don't actually even reach the legs.  Most paper dolls you see have their arms sort of sticking out to the sides, or have arms drawn in with the clothes, so that they go over the actual arms on the doll. (Like this.)

I imagine drawing the arms attached to the clothes makes it much easier, but I think it's a little creepy making them have several sets of arms at once.

 Nadia was fairly easy to make because her arms were tucked behind her back. But I wanted them to look different, so I made Tamora's arms hanging down at her sides.Then realized that that wouldn't work. There would be nowhere for the tabs on the sides to go.

So, I ended up doing this thing where I cut a little slit on the line where her arms are against her sides. It was a pain, because I had to line up the tabs exactly with that spot, but it worked! ☺

And now, I still haven't bent any of the tabs on the outfits. I can't bring myself to do it.
But the clothes really do fit them!

(This looks a little weird because it's hard to get it positioned right on the scanner and I refuse to use the tabs.  It looks better in real life.)

Sooo, in conclusion......

Paper dolls are great fun, especially the clothes. ☺☺☺☺☺☺

~THE END!~

-Ava