Barn Raising: Shadows from the Past

 Not only did I finish my NaMoPaiMo horse, I finished my barn raising project, too.

Like the NaMoPaiMo horse,

it isn't perfect.

I should've put something into these pictures so that the scale would show.

That tiny scale (1:144) made it really difficult for me to paint and assemble it.

But I have learned that challenging myself, hard as it may be, can also give you a very strong sense of satisfaction. (A lesson I learned from Can Do Gracie and her classmates.)

I can't wait to set this up with Little Lynn and Circus Girl and see how it looks with them. 

Shades of Can Do Gracie as well as the girls of Pawnee Stables.

I did it!

I'm a Doll! (Again)

If you read Anne Field's blog (and if you don't, you really should start), you may have noticed that she recently posted photos of three dolls that she had just completed. One of those dolls was mine.

Photo by Anne Field.

Anne and I chat online nearly every day, and a couple of weeks ago I'd said that I was so happy with the Circus Girl doll that she'd made me, that I was now wanting a Lynn doll - me as a casual western doll, one that would have been right at home at Pawnee Stables. 

Anne made a few suggestions that would make the doll more versatile should I decide to do any performance showing and, having told Anne that there was no rush, I settled in to wait. 

I didn't wait long. Several days later, I got a series of photos from Anne.

The doll arrived this week and I am so happy with her - Anne did a wonderful job (I can tell a good sewing job when I see one!)

Some borrowed tack also arrived (more on that later) so naturally Lynn had to go for a ride. 

I thought about taking her across the street for a ride along the shore of the lake like the Pawnee Stables girls used to do at Blackbird Pond. Or maybe a ride down by the Wabash would be fun - I still have access to the riverfront at my old home.

There are endless possibilities, and I am so excited to explore them. 

Thanks, Anne!

50th Anniversary - Life Sketches

During the late 1960s, Pawnee Stables was a busy place. Not only did I constantly play with my carpet herd and "the girls," I also sketched scenes from their daily lives. As luck would have it, I discovered that I had saved some of those pictures when I opened the box that contained the Pawnee Stables things.

Through the pictures I drew, I told the story of life at the stable. And in so doing, I put my own dreams of horse ownership on paper.

A view of the grounds.

Lana was my favorite doll, and she factors into many of the pictures I drew. Here she is riding Frosty along the banks of Blackbird Pond. Do you recognize the horse she is on?

The real Frosty, Breyer's Semi-Rearing Stallion in charcoal, is still with me and remains my all-time favorite Breyer. And Blackbird Pond is a real place here in West Lafayette. I learned to ice skate on it, and Bobbie Sue and I used to go there on winter weekends and chase each other around on the ice.

Here Skipper is welcoming Lana to the stable. Lana has brought her bird (the covered cage to the right of her feet) and is smiling as she meets the girls. Besides those bell bottom pants, do you see anything odd? (I couldn't draw hands very well, so they're all tucked behind their backs!)

In this picture, Lana is riding Desert Wind, a Traditional sized Japan china model. (Or, "glass horse" as Leslie and I called them.) He broke and was thrown away. I've looked for him many times on eBay, Etsy, and MH$P but had no luck. Gabilon is still with me; he is a cheap plastic FAS knockoff although I drew him here in a walking position.

No hands again! And more bell bottoms.... Bobbie (who also drew a lot) and I were working on realism, and somehow we got it into our heads that that meant adding ribs to all the horses in our drawings. Sheena is another old favorite - bet you can tell who she is. 

Like Frosty and most of my carpet herd, she is still with me.

I drew non-horsey scenes like this one of a pillow fight in the bunkhouse (see the model horse by the lamp?) ...

... and others where Pawnee Stables traveled to shows, such as Madison Square Gardens.

Apache Joe and Skipper were champion barrel racers!

Apache Joe is that buckskin horse next to my Christmas stocking on the couch. He is packed away with Gabilon but he is still dear to my heart.

I saved my very favorite picture to the last. I even remember drawing it. 

Swimming with a horse at Blackbird Pond! And in a way, it was a bit of a foreshadowing of my own real horse experiences.

Me about five years later as a teenager swimming with Cee in Burnett Creek.

Things were winding down for Pawnee Stables by the end of 1969. We were moving to a new home and property on the Wabash where my parents planned to buy me a horse. I was old enough that playing with dolls was a bit embarrassing. Moving out into the country put me into a new school and away from Bobbie Sue and Carol.

But good things were ahead - in 1970, Pawnee Stables would morph into a new place. I'd get my first horse, Amy, and I would discover the formal model horse hobby.

Look for the next giveaway to be posted tomorrow!

50th Anniversary - The Girls of Pawnee Stables

Pawnee Stables was a very active barn back in the late 1960s. Three teenage girls ran it with no adults to help. And did those girls ever do an excellent job of caring for a bunch of younger girls, a herd of horses, the bunkhouse, and the grounds! 

Lana (a Marx Best of the West Janice West doll) and Skipper still remain in my Pawnee Stable things. Lana was my favorite because she was so posable.

Sadly, Jane, my Josie West doll and third member of the trio of girls running the barn, was not in the box.  (Photo from Collectors.com.)

I was at an age where I no longer played with dolls, but I still had them, so I rounded them up and added them to the bunkhouse. If you are old enough to remember Mattel's Liddle Kiddles series, you will recognize them!

Clockwise from left: Liddle Red Riding Hiddle, Greta Griddle, Liddle Diddle, Surfy Skiddle, and Violet Kiddle. Violet was scented as was Lily of the Valley Kiddle who is missing. Also missing is Lola Liddle. 

A very late addition to the bunkhouse was Allison, a souvenir from a trip to Paris, and Ida, a souvenir Native American doll who I no longer have. 

Using items from my Barbies, I created a bunkhouse on one shelf of my bookcase. I taped this backdrop to it and added a Barbie couch (now gone),

a record player, phone (notice that rotary dial!), teapot, and basket of flowers for the coffee table (also gone). And, the best part of all:

A Color TV! Only the best for the Pawnee Stables gals! (We got our first color TV around 1966 so this was really a big deal.)

The barn had its own amenities including this coke machine. (Folks in this part of Indiana do not call it soda or pop, we call it coke. If you want something fizzy to drink, we ask, "What kind of coke do you want?")

I put every kind of coke on there that I could. Notice that the cost was only ten cents and that you got a bottle, not a can.

The coke machine was made from an empty parakeet seed box. I had a really nice parakeet back then, Buttons, who could talk and whistle. I also used his discarded feathers for Native American regalia. (See those in a future blog entry.)

The Pawnee Stables girls had access to Dixie Cup/Lincoln Log jumps, complete with their own stable brand.

I created cavaletti out of egg carton cups. They, too, carried the barn's brand.

And naturally the girls saved all the ribbons they won in shows. Some of these are from the live shows I held with Bobbie Sue and Carol. There used to be some Breyer blue ribbon stickers that I'd taken off my models, but sadly, those are gone, too.

I spent hours and hours with my carpet herd and the Pawnee Stables girls.  I even drew pictures of them going about their various activities, too. Look for those in a future blog entry.

The winner of the first giveaway, the alabaster Shetland Pony, will be announced in another post later today.

My Earliest Blankets

I see a lot of improvement in the practice blankets I am making now when compared to my earliest attempts. Back then when I was in elementary school, I had no sewing machine to use or any sewing skills aside from threading a needle and sewing on a button and some rudimentary embroidery skills.

These three blankets are my very first efforts. They're pretty crude, but their sentimental value for me is through the roof! The childhood memories come rushing back just by looking at them.

I stitched them by hand back in the 1960s when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The yellow wire was from clippings left behind by the phone company as they installed new telephone lines in a neighborhood being built by mine. Bobbie, Carol, and I used to scavenge those bits of wire after the workers had left for the day. Pliable and easily cut, we turned them into bits, hooks, hoof picks, and fasteners of all kinds for our stables.

My carpet herd Five Gaiter, Sham, wearing his old victory blanket. 

Underneath Sham's name is my stable symbol from the 1960s. The three of us chose Native American names for them at the time. Bobbie's was Apache Stables, Carol's was Cherokee, and mine was Pawnee Stables. In 1970 when I joined the infant hobby I changed the name to Windsong to reflect the fact that my home was on the Wabash River. One of my favorite things to do was to walk along the river's banks and listen to the sound of the wind rushing through the Cottonwood trees' leaves. I love and connect to that name so much that I have never changed it in all these years of collecting.

As for the other blanket, Apache Joe was a cheap plastic model (I searched online but could not find a photo of him in Google Images) and he was my barrel racer in our backyard shows. That blanket was his award for winning barrel racing multiple times at our pretend Madison Square Gardens. (I smile at the memories as I type.) Bobbie, Carol, and I actually timed our models as we galloped them around Dixie cup "barrels" and across a finish line made from a green Lincoln Log roof piece.

I don't think that the third blanket was ever completed. Still, I hang onto it - those sentimental feelings are so strong. And as for the colors of blue and yellow being the same as Breyer's, the blue fabric was the only scrap large enough found in my mother's store of fabric remnants that could be made into several blankets. The yellow embroidery floss stood out nicely against the blue color and was snazzier than white. (And, I had matching yellow telephone wire to make the closure!) But the coincidence does make me smile.

These three are tucked lovingly in with the much nicer, commercially made Breyer blankets and my practice blankets. They're definitely some of my collection treasures.