I count eight.

All four cloth dolls were made using our Great Auntie Maude’s Favorite Cloth Doll Pattern, available in the Marketplace. It’s so much fun to see the individuality each girl’s doll has!

A simple cloth doll can be a great Christmas gift, and definitely works well in the toy basket for living history events. These girls are all set to do some high quality historic interpretation, just by sitting under a tree and playing together. They can also undertake their own doll sewing and gain useful historic stitching skills (to the delight of mothers everywhere!)

Thanks, girls, for sharing your dolls with us!

I hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving here in the US has had a great holiday…David and Beth made an appearance as Father Christmas and Holly Elf for a fundraising 2-5-10K race on Thanksgiving morning. Beth can now steal my 1860s shoes! It was a fantastic start to the season.

If your house is like ours, now is the time to swing into Christmas surprises and projects!

We’re busy prepping a big stack of orders to ship this week. (Remember to place your Christmas-delivery orders by 10 December, please!)  I can’t wait to see pictures of the clothes and dolls everyone will be making! You can send them to me here.

Here’s the best news: we have SIX additional Civility china dolls for you this Christmas! Sandra Jusak creates and hand-paints the beautiful glazed porcelain head, hands, and feet; I create and assemble the bodies, and ship them to your doorstep. These six are the last Civility dolls before spring, so if you’ve been wanting one, now’s the time. Check out the Doll Case in the Marketplace tab above. Don’t forget to take a peek at the other gorgeous doll options we have in stock!

And of course, there’s our lovely Cloth Doll pattern, available in Patterns & Publications!

I’m also working on a few new pattern surprises (one may be ready in time for Christmas delivery!), and working out presentation details for the Mid-West Conference in January. It’s a busy time of year, but gorgeous with all the snow!

“The work of Charity is ever a work of pleasure, and the great work of charity to sustain that noblest development of this cruel war, the Sanitary Commission, in which we are all now enlisted, is bringing pleasures in its train we had never anticipated. A movement which so thoroughly enlists the sympathy of all classes, and all ages, from the millionaire to the poor sewing woman; from the grandsire to the school girl, was perhaps, never before witnessed. All are doing something, contributing each according to his or her means or opportunities; and what an amount of latent power to do good has thus been developed. How many new ways of assisting in the good work have been discovered. All that is asked is that each shall contribute of what they have; if they are not blessed with riches, then give of their talents, their art, their skill, and there are none too poor but can contribute in some of these ways to the work in hand.”

~The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 23 January 1864

One interesting aspect of the American Civil War is the degree to which everyday citizens became involved in the war effort. All across the nation, from areas directly affected by the battles, to areas far removed from the conflict’s front, ordinary citizens came together in a multitude of ways to support “our boys”—regardless of the color of “our boy’s” uniform.

The Aid Fair was not a new idea; expositions and fairs had become a popular means of fundraising and entertainment in the first half of the century. It was natural, then, to use the arrangement of a Fair as a means of raising the funds and supplies needed for the war effort on both sides. Read the rest of this entry »