Patty

I'm old enough to remember the Cabbage Patch Wars.  Moms allegedly duking it out over stuffed dolls in toy-store aisles across the country.  I'm not sure how much of that really happened, but I do remember that Cabbage Patch Kids were really popular, really scarce, and, by some standards, really expensive.

My parents were moderates when it came to commercial toys.  They didn't like us to have a lot of toys that did everything for us, but they weren't vehemently opposed to toy fads, either.  We had Go-Bots and Transformers and a Voltron.  I had a set of Robotix.  I'm totally dating myself now, aren't I?  Ha.

But Cabbage Patch Kids were out of reach, at least during the first wave of popularity.  Mom, though, is pretty crafty, so she bought heads and made her own.

This is Patty.  Patricia Noel (I didn't know "Noelle" was the girls' version).  She was a Christmas gift in 1982.  My brother has a blond boy doll.

The teddy bear was a gift from an ex-boyfriend.  No hard feelings, though.

The heads were sold in little boxes at Toys R Us.  The store would stack the boxes in big cubes in the front of the store.  I would do almost anything now to have a picture of one of those cubes of doll heads--they were both hilarious and unspeakably creepy.

I only found out recently that Patty and Douglas are Martha Nelson Thomas Original Doll Babies, and that they're debatably the older siblings of Cabbage Patch Kids.