Birthday party

A friend emailed me this picture recently, taken at her birthday party in around 1975 (I had to boost the colours before uploading it - the original was verging on sepia!).

Note the influence of Little House on the Prairie at the time - especially the dark-haired Nellie Oleson copycat in the white dress.

I'm sitting bottom right, looking very prim/nervous in my homemade neck-to-floor brown Laura Ashley dress. My mother used to do a lot of dressmaking when I was a child (my sister had exactly the same style of dress, but her version was made using the beige-with-dark-brown-flowers colourway).

We don't look a particularly jolly bunch in this shot, but I still meet up with two of the girls here, and I really must stress that we've blossomed into extremely glamorous 40-something women!