Big Girls Paper Dolls

How much fun is this site??? Ohhhh so much fun.

When I was a girl... all them years ago one of my favourite things to do was design dresses, I would spend hours and hours drawing figures and designing clothes, quite often I would make them for my Sindy's,  never had a Barbie,  only ever a Sindy and Pippa's but every spare moment found me drawing, cutting and sewing.

So coming across this site was such a delight. Looklet is a big girls paper doll where you can pick your doll (model)  background, outfits, accessories... give it a try you'll see. 

 

You can create your own lookbooks and share them with your friends.

Have a go yourself, check out Looklet

Bunratty Castle

We popped along to Bunratty Castle in County Clare during our weeks holiday visit to my in-laws. The castle is inside a heritage site which includes a folk park of historial buildings like a fishermans cottage, a peat cutters cottage, an old school building, a recreation of a whole street of shops. 

Bunratty Castle itself is an amazing building,  there has been dwellings on the site since 970 but the first defensive building was built in 1270, since then there had always been a castle of some sort on the site.   The present castle was built in 1425 and was occupied  pretty consistently until 1804 when the building was left and fell into disrepair. 

In 1954 the Castle was bought and restored to its present condition by the 7th Viscount Gort and his wife.   Having walked around the place I doubt that they restored it to live in as it didn't seem particularly cmfortable a place to live. 

Plaque commemorating the restoration by Viscount Gort

The Castle itself was very very busy, it's obviously a very popular tourist destination as I was hearing lots of accents and languages from the people walking around. 

Highly recommended as a place to visit but be warned the whole park is quite big,  we didn't manage to see it all as with a 5 year old with us it got quite tiring and both he and I were pretty shattered by the time we had done the castle and the village. I think we will be going back again during another visit to see all the bits we missed out. 

There's plenty of information available about the castle, the folk park, opening times etc on the Shannon Heritage website 

Tapestry inside the main Hall of the Castle

Inside a cottage recreation

All of the buildings in the Folk park have been brought to Bunratty stone by stone and rebuilt from sites all over Ireland including one from Shannon Airport when a runway was being put in.  It's a fascinating look at how people lived.  I wouldn't have made a very good early Irishwoman that's for sure... the peat fire really irritated my eyes.

But I was really impressed by the level of detail put in to recreating the cottages, including photographs, chinaware and all the paraphanalia of family life.

This statue was hidden away in some trees and hedges mostly unnoticed but it caught my attention.