Update: I know I said I wouldn’t post the colored versions before, but I changed my mind. I really don’t think these are done until colored. Becasue I color them with colored pencils, the coloring won’t be even or perfect, and I really don’t like the way some of the outfits are colored. But I promised someone I’d let them see the colored versions, so here is one of them.
A colored version of an old paper doll will be posted each Friday, uploaded to the original post, with edits made to the text to explain coloring choices.
I love history. Nothing excites me more than learning about how people lived in the past. The Dear America series and its international spin-offs are what really began my love affair with the past, but I always though the cover portraits weren’t very accurate. So I made them accurate.
And then I added in the spin-offs, because those are history too, then the books not published by Scholastic but in the same format, then decided to add the events that none of those books covered and will likely never cover.
So this is Mem, the first of over 100 paper heroines I’ve made. Mem’s family travels from Holland to England to Massachusetts to set up a colony where their religion can be allowed to exist.
Mem wears a shift as the base of her underwear, stockings for her feet, a petticoat to keep her warm, stays (or a corset) to give her a proper figure, and a bumroll around her waist to shape her skirts. Her hair is in a bun to keep it out of her face while she works. Undies have been pretty standardly white throughout history, so they are white. I chose brown for Mem’s hair, but her real color is never really specified.
Her first outfit is a simple day outfit, with a skirt, jacket (that would have had separate sleeves and doubled as a vest in warmer weather), an apron, and tied leather shoes. A cap for her hair keeps it safe, and a wool cloak keeps her warm. Red and green were pretty standard colors for pilgrim clothes, so that is what Mem has. Her cap, collar, apron, and cuffs (all of which would be removable) are white because those are the things that would get the dirtiest and would require the most washing, white being easiest to bleach and get stains out.
Her second outfit, which is less historically accurate and more of what most people think of a pilgrim clothes, is a church dress with a white collar and cuffs. Her shoes would be the same, and she would also wear her cap with this outfit. I went with stereotypical black and white coloring for this dress, because, 1. black was worn as a Sunday church color, and 2. I wanted something stereotypical.
The third is a Wampanoag (the Natives who were at the first Thanksgiving) dress. With it, she has a wampum bead necklace, leggings, moccasins, and a belt. Mem never wore this outfit, but she was very curious about the Wampanoag. I imagine if she ever did wear an outfit like theirs, she’d refuse to take her undergarments off and war the dress over them. The dress is supposed to be made of buckskin, hence the brown coloring.
Mem’s clothes would not have been black and white, but a wide variety of colors. Red, green, blue, and brown were popular.
Her book is available in the original US cover here, in an updated cover here, in a British version here, and even a French version here. The French company publishes books in a very similar vein to Dear America, and you can bet I’ll eventually do them all too. I love that Mem’s French name is Esther.
Lina's Paperdolls 