Gentle Reader,
It's Tuesday again ..... so here is a picture that may look familiar, if you read the previous post.  Back in 2008 (when I first received the My First Kenmore kitchen) I made Ann Estelle an apron.  An apron, in fact, "fit for a queen".

_ Gentle Blog Reader,
I know that many folks that play with the ten inch dolls and are lucky enough to have several of each sculpt like to rename their dolls and some want to name them with “official” Mary Engelbreit names.  For those so inclined I’ve done an informal survey of names that have been used over the years by Mary herself and by companies to whom she licensed for dolls.  I looked at both two and three dimensional dolls; both cloth and hard product dolls.  Here is a list, arranged with the most frequently used names at the top:

_ As we describe on the “Ann Estelle Story” page, Ann Estelle is the name of Mary Engelbreit’s maternal grandmother.  I have heard it said that Audrey Ann is/was one of Mary’s maternal aunts and that Tommy is one of her cousins , the son of Audrey Ann.  Mikayla is the name of her granddaughter.

I’ve also heard two versions of why Tonner chose to name the boy in the ten inch series Michael (who appears as one of the magnetic “paper dolls” and a non "Home Companion" paper doll) and not Tommy (who appears often with the “Home Companion” paper dolls.)  One is that Tonner gave the choice of the two names to a group of fans at a convention and they voted for Michael.  The other is that there was some sort of licensing conflict with the name Tommy, thus he used Michael instead.
Update 02.23.12:
It looks like both the above explanations about why Michael is Michael are urban legends (i.e. false).  Claudia did the intelligent thing and just plain asked Robert Tonner recently and he said he liked the idea that Michael was a clothes horse and that is why he choose the name over Tommy.  I am guessing this refers to a description in Mary Engelbreit's 1997 "Child's Play" paper doll book:  Michael has "a closetful of clothes to choose from whenever he gets dressed.  And he always tries to choose the right ones for whatever he's going to be doing ..."  So there you have it! R.

And so you can also name your dolls' pets with true ME pedigree, here is a list of the pets’ names from the paper dolls:

Bingo = Gracie’s hamster
Bonny Rose = Lilah’s puppy
Bubbles = Ann Estelle’s goldfish
Frank = Tommy’s mouse
Henry = Ann Estelle’s dog
Jean Pierre = Gracie’s guinea pig
Mabel = Audrey Ann’s cat
Maggie Lou = Georgia’s dog
Violet = Gracie’s cat

What, no one keeps pet birds?!   R.

Gentle Blog Reader,
It's Tuesday and what does that mean??  "It's Red's Tamale Day!!!!"  I only wish - since that would mean I was about twelve years old again (plus I really do like tamales)!!  Nope, what this means is the kick-off of what I hope will be a nice tradition - we will share some of our own interpretations of Mary's illustrations on our dolls.  "ME Too'sday" - As in "Tonner can do it - me too"  (Not very elegant grammar, I do admit!)

And what better place to start than way back at the beginning for me.  I made this outfit in late 2003 or early 2004, and it is the first one where I tried to follow an ME illustration.

Since that time I added Tonner's wonderful boots (from Michael's cowboy outfit, I believe) to my collection and they look much better than my early efforts to make boots!  But I must admit, I am, to this day, intensely proud of these gloves!  And I've tried and tried since then to make similarly well fitted gloves and never again succeed so well - it has to do with the type of fabric, I'm sure.

Next up: What's in a name??