The short of it is that we've got a new round robin doll to share with you (there she is disrobed at the left). And with a little extra time available due to the holiday season, I hope to get her posted in her entirety before the New Year. Yay!

The long of it is that this will probably be the end of 19thcenturypaperdolls as you've known it (in case its imminent "end" hasn't been obvious until now). The disruptions in my life have just sucked up all my energy. I thought I would find my way back here after the summer and I thought participating in the round robins would put me back in the spirit of things, but my focus is too divided and clearly my heart just isn't committed.

So after the New Year I will be shuttering this site. I'll leave it up for a while as I decide whether I want to pull it completely. Who knows ~ maybe next spring I'll find the wherewithall to come back to it.

Be sure to stop by one last time to see the final results of this round-robin and thank you for visiting and sharing your comments!

Check it out! Our inaugural Paper Doll Round Robin is a thrilling success with four intrepid paper-dollers coming together across the country to create for you a Happy Halloween Lady of Late Autumn Legend and Lore! Rachel, Toria, Liana and myself all contributed to this spooky fun creation.

If you would like to download this Lovely Lady to color and cut, visit Rachel's website at Paper Thin Personas!  Hope you enjoy!

We have another Round Robin in the works. If you would like to be part of it, leave a message and we'll let you in!

McLaughlin made some strange animal paper dolls in the 1890s (you can see some others if you click "animals" under the categories to the right. But this is probably the strangest I've come across.

I suppose it has charm; makes me wonder at all the creepy dolls and toys that are on the market today that 100 years from now people will wonder about the appeal.

Anyway, this is just one of those quick check-in posts to make sure I try to keep things going. Wanted to post about my current work-in-progress but I haven't worked up the courage for a reveal since it's still very unfinished.

I will say it's doll-related, but in a maybe unexpected way.

I will also say that I am still thinking of tearing down this site (and rebuilding ~ so no, it's not going to just go away). But it's lacked serious focus for more years than I care to acknowledge. I just haven't quite figured out what it is I want to do with it.

It's been a long, hard summer for me, with competing interests taking away time from paper dolls. I'm a ridiculously huge fan of Christopher Nolan's Batman series and unless you have been under a rock since June you know that this summer was the release of the Dark Knight Rises ~ so my attention has been elsewhere.

But I'm coming back eventually ~ I promise!  I'm teaming up with Toria over at A Paper Closet and Rachel over at Paper Thin Personas to do something Halloweeny ( I think). It's going to be fabulous!

I want to write something more about what I have been working on, but haven't really organized my thoughts about it. Will try to post again in the next couple of days or thereabouts. In the meantime, I offer Little Mary from 1857 (got this from an auction site, I believe ~ how sad is this? It's been so long I can't even remember).

Ah well. Just have to think forward, right?

As promised, here's the last of Volume 26 for Judy. Apropos since it's June and these last two pieces correspond to the month. Click on the image to download a printable .pdf.

If you need the doll, click on the Judy category at right and you'll be able to find her. If it wasn't so hot and I wasn't so lazy, I'd link to the first post, but this way you can see all of the Judy-related posts at the same time.

I was going to go back and pick up Volume 25, which I accidentally skipped, but since I kind of like the whole corresponding months thing, I might continue with Volume 27, which picks up in July.

In other Nudes: If you haven't voted on my poll in the previous post, please do! I had to smile when I checked it this morning since in the night someone quietly voted for the stark naked option (but left no comments; boy would I like to hear about that choice). 

Here is a very beautiful German set of dolls that were misidentified on eBay as Edward VII and Alexandra, but they are really Kaiser Frederick III and his wife consort Victoria. The dolls date from the late 1880s and have the most gorgeous color. Paper dolls of German manufacture during this period were quite impressive and royal personalities were a favorite subject (they were the movie stars and the tabloid fodder of their day).

Click on the picture to enjoy the detail!

So much beautiful art out there in the paper doll blog world. Can't seem to focus on my own. It may continue to be a while before I post anything original, though I will try to be regular-ish about keeping up this blog while I sort out what it is exactly that I want to do. Hope you enjoy these posts!

Came across this fun and unusual advertising doll, which is typical of the late 19th Century. These dolls always required assembly and I love all the parts! Wild Ike is a non-copyright-infringing variation on Buffalo Bill & Co., which was at the height of its popularity (fascination with the Wild West would see a precipitous decline within the decade ~ not to be revived again until the advent of television). America was climbing out of a depression and paper toys like this were relatively cheap. It was one of a series for which there were 5 dolls, with interchangeable costume pieces.

Found this example on eBay. I had seen one actually cut and assembled before, but it's really cool to see how it originally appeared on the page. Click the image to see more detail and read all that teensy tiny print!

In other news: I guess I have been gone for a long long while. Been very very busy on other projects and, having not made decisions about what to do with this blog, I guess I have neglected it. Thought about it all weekend, but apparently came to no particular conclusions. There's so much I want to do (with this blog, and in my creative life in general), and since everything is competing for my attention, nothing appears to be getting done.

So I have been trying to set priorities and paper dolls, while still a passion for me that I am not ready to give up, have slid down the exigency slope toward the bottom. Just for the time being. I'm sure as soon as I get organized, I can come back to this with renewed effort.

An exchange over at RLC's blog about double-sided paper dolls reminded me suddenly that I hadn't updated my own blog since returning from a long visit to my sister's.

So I thought I should share a few double-sided dolls I came across (I know not where) during my internet travels.  This is an advertising set (though I don't know what the product was), and the figures are characters from the Pocahontes story.

I would love love love to make full-on double-sided dolls in the style of the 19th century, but I am horrifically daunted by the complexity of it ~ I can barely seem to get single-sided dolls together, let alone tackle something like this. Still, I do get all moony-eyed and hope-sick when I think about how totally cool these are.

In other news, I've got Frank all re-tooled (after finding my lost files), and will try to post his final plates this week. I have been to busy to make either his hats or his final street clothes, so maybe this coming weekend I will try to make that a priority. Since I don't know yet what I am doing with this blog, it's been hard finding time to commit to it one way or the other. But I ain't giving it up yet!

First of all, I can't believe I never posted these, as I have had them scanned since ages ago! I must have forgotten (sheesh). But I guess they are timely since it's now May and we're heading into June. I have two more costumes for Judy from Volume 26 that I will try to post this week and then I'll have to get to work on the next volume!

Also, Weebly has done horrible things with the formatting on here (why do they randomly change a blog style ~ I hate that!). So again, I am thinking of moving elsewhere where I can control my own creative space a little more. I like the convenience of some of the things here at Weebly (and it's a very nice platform for non-designers/non-coders, but I am used to being able to set my own agendas and I don't like when some outside force comes in and "improves" on things you are perfectly happy with in the first place.

And the site just timed out on me AGAIN. Grrrrr.

In better news, I found my Frank Merriwell files (I had dumped from out of Dropbox onto the desktop of my other computer, so yay! They are saved! I am visiting my sister for the holiday weekend, so I won't be able to post the final plates until next week sometime, probably, but at least I don't have to rebuild everything!