A is for A Little Bit of Silliness

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

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!

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.

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.