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Lady Hollyhock and Her Friends: A Book of Nature Dolls and Others cover

Lady Hollyhock and Her Friends: A Book of Nature Dolls and Others

Chapter 11: Pansy Ladies
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About This Book

This book presents a collection of craft projects, short sketches, and songs guiding children and caregivers to make dolls, figures, and toy animals from flowers, fruits, seeds, nuts, corn husks, clay, paper, and common household odds and ends. Clear instructions, patterns, jingles, and plentiful illustrations accompany step-by-step plans and brief vignettes that suggest play scenarios. Emphasizing imagination, thrift, and hands-on skill-building, the selections encourage observational acquaintance with plants and seasons while promoting creativity, resourcefulness, and simple domestic arts suitable for young makers.

Pansy Ladies

Pansy dolls were made in several ways—and pansy verses with them. Of these dolls the easiest to make were the paper ones, folded and cut as all children cut rows of doll dresses. Then a small hole was cut in the top of each dress, and the pansy stem put into it. Without further work there stood a pansy lady with a paper body and blossom head.

Other pansy dolls were made by covering tiny pill bottles with grass blades, or leaves, putting one end of each leaf in the bottle, turning them all down, and tying them in place with a grass blade sash. When the bottle was filled with water and a pansy put into it, the children had a pansy lady who would live a day or two.

“Rich purple hued velvets the pansy maids wear,
While cunning caps rest on their long yellow hair,”

quoted Mamma when she was invited out to see a row of these visitors of Lady Hollyhock’s.

PANSY LADIES