Tammy

When I was a very little girl, sometime before Christmas, I saw my mom sewing something. Normally I wouldn't have given this much thought, but Mom was having a hard time with her project, and Dad was helping her. They were making hair out of yarn! I asked Mom what she was making, and she said it was a doll. 

"Who's it for?"

She said it was a present for Kelma, a friend of mine. When I told her I wanted a new doll too, she told me something like I should be thinking about other people, and not just myself. Which I didn't quite get at the time.

I just took this picture of her cute face this morning. You can see that she has a little stain above her nose. Tammy was well-loved!

Then Christmas came around and that doll was all wrapped up in a package for me! A beautiful little-girl, rag-doll, with hand-painted face, brick-red yarn hair, and a bright red dress. (That dress was often the bane of our cat, who looked hilarious walking down the hallway in it—
I wish I had pictures.) Denise got the matching boy doll; they were named Tammy and Tommy; Mom named them. In fact, I think I asked for her help naming most of my dolls.

Tammy and Tommy were Raggedy Ann-type dolls, and Denise and I played with them all.  the.  time. Tammy survived playing outside and inside, and several trips through the washing machine, clear up until I had little girls of my own.

And then one of them cut her bangs off! (No pics, unfortunately.)

And her panties disappeared. So I put Tammy away, intending to fix her up one day.

I finally started working on her last January. 

Tammy's original yarn hair had been stitched to strips of fabric, and then the fabric strips were then attached to her head—I had already removed all of it a few years ago. Now (in January) I finally embroidered her new hair directly onto her head. 

Originally, Tammy had straight hair. But I thought it looked so cute curly, that I left it looped. 

Then she sat in my room for a few months.

Well, this week I decided it was time to remake her clothes. I was lucky that I had a little piece of the original fabric Mom had made her clothes with. Yay! But when I compared that fabric to Tammy's clothes this is what I saw:

On the left is the sleeve of Tammy's original blouse. On the right is the fabric scrap that (thankfully) I must have swiped from my Mom's fabric stash years ago.

Well. I couldn't make bright, practically neon-colored panties and still keep Tammy in her faded blouse, so I took the blouse apart to use as a pattern for a new one. I had just enough fabric to cut out a new blouse and panties for her.

I wanted to make the outfit as similar as I could to the one Mom made, so even I sewed it together with green thread, like she did. (Hers was more of an apple-green, but I used the yellow-green color I already had at home.)
I went to the store to get new ric-rac to put on the edges of the neck, sleeves, and the legs of the panties. I don't remember if the panties had ric-rac trim on them or not, but I think they probably must have matched. In the end it didn't matter. The new ric-rac was so big (the only size they had at the store) and so heavy that I didn't like it on the clothes at all. So I reused the old ric-rac on the blouse, and trimmed the panties' legs with lace.

I finished the blouse and panties this morning.
I do think I would have preferred to have the
matching ric-rac on the panty-legs, but there's not much I could do about that. They will be hidden
under her skirt anyway.

I was a little worried that I'd lost the original buttons, but they were in my button box. You can see that the buttonholes are made with the green thread. :-)

And now Tammy is all dressed, she has pretty hair, and she's ready for...

...ready for what?

I guess she's ready to join the other toys in my "grandma stash." And hopefully some day somebody else will love her until she's falling apart.