About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

A is for A Little Bit of Silliness

Unless you worry about rubbish, in which case Wombles are very serious things!

Alderney; Blow Moulded Toy; Bungo; Flocked Toy; Flocking; Great Uncle Bulgaria Coburg; HCF; Madame Cholet; Novelty Figurines; Orinoco; Picking Up Rubbish; Picking Up Things; Small Scale World; smallscaleworld.blogspot.com; The Folks Leave Behind; Tobermory; Tomsk; Underground Overground; Wellington; Wimbledon Common; Womble; Wombles; Wombling;
I picked this chap up in a mixed lot the other day, I think he may have been Uncle Bulgaria once but he was beyond tatty, and it was either save him somehow or . . . off to recycling . . . sniff!

Now; I feel I have a close association with Wombles, my Granny made my brother and I very realistic ones in her craft group when we were kids which I still have somewhere; you often see similar really good unbranded Wombles in charity shops or on feeBay and I think they were all produced with the same plans/pattern by WI-circles and the like? They sometimes have sewn-in paper or card stiffening the ears! We had Uncle B and Wellington.

Also; we were big fans of the TV series anyway, and later we rented a field from the Author (Liza Beresford) who would sometimes chat to us over the wall while we worked it, so throwing Wombles in the recycling is akin to cold-blooded murder, ergo; 'Do something Muttley!' was the only option!

Alderney; Blow Moulded Toy; Bungo; Flocked Toy; Flocking; Great Uncle Bulgaria Coburg; HCF; Madame Cholet; Novelty Figurines; Orinoco; Picking Up Rubbish; Picking Up Things; Small Scale World; smallscaleworld.blogspot.com; The Folks Leave Behind; Tobermory; Tomsk; Underground Overground; Wellington; Wimbledon Common; Womble; Wombles; Wombling;
The flock had to go, I tried to save the scarf but it fell apart due to age! I saved the eye (2) and the nose (3), and would have replaced the missing eye, or both with glass beads, but the remains of his looking-glasses had such a long locating-stud (1), I managed to melt a bead on the end with a cigarette lighter (at the cost of heat-tendered finger-tips) and form a new eye. The key-ring chain-loop () was the last thing to go.

Alderney; Blow Moulded Toy; Bungo; Flocked Toy; Flocking; Great Uncle Bulgaria Coburg; HCF; Madame Cholet; Novelty Figurines; Orinoco; Picking Up Rubbish; Picking Up Things; Small Scale World; smallscaleworld.blogspot.com; The Folks Leave Behind; Tobermory; Tomsk; Underground Overground; Wellington; Wimbledon Common; Womble; Wombles; Wombling;
The scarf was then fashioned with a section of bootlace, which is looped through itself in the modern style and was held-tight and glued at the knot over-night, before being trimmed and the ends frayed with a hat-pin!

As there is already an Alderney ['she'], I shall call him Berlin and he can join the hard plastic ones we've seen in-part, a couple of times now, but - while I want to tick that box - I'm still waiting for an elusive Madame Cholet to turn up.

I suspect both these flocked blow-moulds and the similar-sized hard-plastic ones were HCF imports, certainly there were the remains of one of those little gold stickers on the underside of his feet, but it's a guess, not yet empirical.

3 comments:

EY said...
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EY said...

I don't think the Wombles ever made it over here to the US, so I had to look them up on Google. Seems like restoring the little fellow was very appropriate.

Nice job!

Hugh Walter said...

Cheers EY, they is a certain poignancy to the logic! I can't believe you didn't get the Wombles? Can't really describe them, sort of all the best bits of Scooby, Muttly and Bugs Bunny in a cone-shaped cookie-monster, determined to do good, quietly!

H