Carmen Shrine

When my Mom was a little girl in the 70s, she got a doll that looked like a little pioneer girl, and she called her 'Carmen'.

Years later, when she was grown (my Mom, that is, not Carmen-- though I suppose Carmen was older, if not larger), she had a little girl-- me!-- and I played with Carmen, too.

(And also Carmen played with me, I suppose. Symmetric Property!)

Carmen is simply the ideal doll! Cute, soft, and just the right size to fit in the palm of your hand.

When I was a young teen, I sewed a few dolls of my own, with a base design inspired by Carmen. For reasons I no longer remember, however, I did not give my dolls any arms.

Over the years I tried to find more information about Carmen, with little luck-- though her tag listed a manufacturer ("Russ Berrie"), neither Google nor the patent office website was of help.

No matter! I made a few more Carmen-alikes-- Cocoa Cookie and Simon Blackquill-- and even remembered to give one of them arms!

(Cocoa Cookie was supposed to have arms, but I waited too long to sew them on, and lost them somewhere.)

In 2025, however, I finally managed to track down more information-- and discovered she had sisters! And had possibly once had an ornament loop. And a mouth, of all things!

The mouth was a big surprise to me.

Collected here are the different Carmens: the OG, her sisters, and my Carmen-alikes.

All pictures of Carmen's sisters are taken from various Ebay and Etsy listings.