Introducing Myself

So, where to start, with my new blog?

Well, as I said in my “About” page, I played with and dearly loved Barbies as a child, and that is really where all this began. I was born in the ’60’s and played with Barbies in the ’70’s, mostly. I did have a Skipper doll in the ’60’s, and a little house for her that my parents made for me, complete with a kitchen sink, stove, and refrigerator made out of wooden blocks, and a pink and white gingham couch. I wish I had pictures of them.

My Skipper looked like this:

Here is one of the original commercials:

My sister, who is about 6 1/2 years older than I am, had Barbies (and a Francie, who she loved), and sometimes she would let me play with them. That was such an honor, to me, and made for some of my favorite childhood memories.

I have another blog  where I write about all sorts of things in my life, and in 2009, I re-published three posts that I had originally published in 2008 on an old online diary. In the posts, I wrote about the Nostalgia Room I had wanted to create for my home office at the time. (Here are part one, part two, and part three)

I got back into Barbie and Barbie-sized dolls as an adult partly as a form of therapy, which I will write more about in a later post.

I had an idea, almost a year ago, to try to build an apartment building for my dolls. It was going to be a big project, I knew, and time-consuming, and would require both a large space to work and a large space to keep the building when it was finished. While I don’t mind when a hobby project takes a while to complete, the child in me didn’t want to have to wait for a long time to be able to play with it, and the space thing was an issue. Where would I keep it?

Finally, after doing some searching online and finding that there are so many adults out there who make dioramas and room boxes for their dolls, and noticing that the diorama sets and room boxes can range anywhere from quick-to-put-together to long, involved projects, I decided to make diorama sets instead. I can take them down and put them back up easily, and when they are down I can pack the pieces in plastic tubs and flatten the walls for easy storage. I can begin by making walls, cabinets, etc., out of foam board, and then later, when I get better at it, I can venture into constructing  out of wood.

And I went to town. Both literally and figuratively. I began to collect dolls, clothing, fabrics, craft supplies, and all sorts of other stuff that I can make stuff out of. My partner (who I call SS [for “Someone Special”] in my other blog, and I will call SS here as well) suggested that we turn the dining room into my doll room since we never use it for dining, and I have been working ever since to organize it and get some of my sets built.

I set up a flickr account under the username GetMeStarted. I chose that name because when I was a kid and my sister was a teenager, I used to always ask her to “get me started” with my dolls before she would go out with her friends. We have always been very close, and during those years, when she was spending more time outside the house with her friends, she was mindful enough of her little sister’s pangs of missing her that she made sure to spend a little time with me before she went out. Getting Me Started consisted of brainstorming with me to help me figure out a story that I was going to play out with my dolls that day. We could choose names and careers for each of the dolls, decide where they lived, and even think up names of fictitious local newspapers and radio stations for their town. As time went on and I discovered my love for writing, my sister remained my favorite brainstorming buddy, and to this day, she still happily plays that role.