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newmoonstarFinished the 1830's doll dress, it's cute as a button. I think I'll try out the Regency doll dress next. It would be a much more sensible alternative to doing a can-can girl outfit. (This is what comes of watching Moulin Rouge last night!)
Continuing my foray into fairy tales. That copy of The Annotated Brothers Grimm has put me on quite a kick. I wish the library databases allowed you to search by illustrator, because I've been trying to look up different versions of fairy tales mostly based on the illustrated ones I loved as a child. K.Y. Craft was one of my absolute favorites, and Paul O. Zelinsky did beautiful versions of Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, which I now appreciate even more, because I know how well researched the costumes and settings are. I love those books because of how pretty they are, but the illustrations that seem the most truly magical are always the old classics, like Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Maxfield Parrish. My mom started it, because she had, and still has, a collection of blank greeting cards of all the best illustrators. When I was little, and she would occasionally bring them out and let me look at them, it was like stepping through a door into the realms of faery. There were the ice bears from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, brought to life by Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish's dreamlike landscapes advertising Edison Mazda lamps, and various other little gems, illustrating scenes from Tristan and Isolde, or the Arabian Nights.
My mom doesn't really care as much about them now, and when she let me keep the whole box of them in my room, and gave me her copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, illustrated by Edmund Dulac, which seemed to me as a child to be like some sort of book of ancient magic that I wasn't really supposed to touch, I felt as if she'd handed me a box of filled with priceless treasures. And in a way, she actually did. And even in spite of all the academic texts and studies and analyses I've read through in the course of this latest foray into fairy tales, I think that box of cards holds the real answer to why fairy tales have such a powerful hold on our cultural imagination. Because it reminds all of us of when we were children, and the first time we got a glimpse of the worlds of magic those tales showed us.
Continuing my foray into fairy tales. That copy of The Annotated Brothers Grimm has put me on quite a kick. I wish the library databases allowed you to search by illustrator, because I've been trying to look up different versions of fairy tales mostly based on the illustrated ones I loved as a child. K.Y. Craft was one of my absolute favorites, and Paul O. Zelinsky did beautiful versions of Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, which I now appreciate even more, because I know how well researched the costumes and settings are. I love those books because of how pretty they are, but the illustrations that seem the most truly magical are always the old classics, like Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Maxfield Parrish. My mom started it, because she had, and still has, a collection of blank greeting cards of all the best illustrators. When I was little, and she would occasionally bring them out and let me look at them, it was like stepping through a door into the realms of faery. There were the ice bears from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, brought to life by Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish's dreamlike landscapes advertising Edison Mazda lamps, and various other little gems, illustrating scenes from Tristan and Isolde, or the Arabian Nights.
My mom doesn't really care as much about them now, and when she let me keep the whole box of them in my room, and gave me her copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, illustrated by Edmund Dulac, which seemed to me as a child to be like some sort of book of ancient magic that I wasn't really supposed to touch, I felt as if she'd handed me a box of filled with priceless treasures. And in a way, she actually did. And even in spite of all the academic texts and studies and analyses I've read through in the course of this latest foray into fairy tales, I think that box of cards holds the real answer to why fairy tales have such a powerful hold on our cultural imagination. Because it reminds all of us of when we were children, and the first time we got a glimpse of the worlds of magic those tales showed us.
