You never know when skills learned long ago will come in handy.

For some time we have felt that some of our clues in the History Detectives workshop needed replacing. One of the characters they research is Edith Ashton who was six years old in 1881. The children are asked to find her favourite toy, and up until now it has been a skipping rope. One of the few things we know for certain about Edith is that she had a bad back, which of course seriously confuses such children as are not already confused by the use of the word 'toy' rather than 'plaything' for a skipping rope.

At the last meeting it was decided to buy a rag doll for her, but apparently all those available on the internet looked much too modern, so I volunteered to make one and was offered two hours pay for doing so.

We now go back to when I was a seven year old in Mrs. Tuplin's class - the first year juniors when we girls spent about two terms making first a rag doll each and then a dress and apron for her. Mine was called Victoria, and when we came to embroidering the face it became clear to everyone that Liz was not merely the cleverest girl in the class, but also the best needlewoman. She - unlike everyone else including Mrs. Tuplin - knew how to do the french knots required for our dolls' eyes. I don't recall now whether she actually sewed all forty eyes, but I know she did my doll's two when my efforts ended in nastily tangled threads which had to be unpicked. In fact she was so good at everything that if she weren't my best friend, I would probably hate her - and frequently did in those days.

Anyway, using the pattern I learned then, I made Victoria mark 2. Nowadays I can manage my own french knots, and the whole thing took about an hour-and-a-half rather than two terms. The original's dress was a simple T-shaped shift pulled in at the waist by an apron. Because this doll is going to be handled by hundreds of children, I made the dress bodice an integral part of the doll, with a gathered skirt, sash and drawers all sewn on to her at the waist. The materials all came out of my rag-bag: the fabric for her body and her dress are modern (less than 40 years old), but her stuffing is strips of a century old pillowcase which disintegrated some long time ago, and her drawers are made from the tattered remains of an even older dressing table runner. Her hair, which I sewed today during the lunch break of a training day for a new workshop, is wool from Margaret's mother's knitting bag and differs from the original Victoria's hair by covering the back of her head (sewn from a neat central parting) rather than just plaits from the top and framimg the face.

So - meet Victoria II.
Dolly

On a completely different tack, father was asked to stand for Chairman of the County Council, but has decided that at 81 into 82 he is too old for all the late nights and large meals this would entail.