So this is one of my egg dolls. She is cut on the bias to try to make her more plump and eggy with only two pieces of fabric. She is stuffed very firmly, not sure how ‘easy’ that is though, and has rice in the bottom so that she will stand up if you set her down firmly enough. So possibly not fun, and too hard. I need to see how she looks if I give one to Rebecca to sew and stuff.

My prototyping was a bit of a comedy of errors, only not as funny. I bought waxed paper rather than freezer paper to iron on to my fabric to send it through the printer (because I am cheap.) Needless to say it didn’t work at all. But what DID work which you might like to know, was to spray-starch the heck out of the sheet of fabric, mutter incantations about how it’s only a $40 printer, and send it through the printer. Anyway, it worked the 4th time. It jammed the first three. I remember there was a trick to it, I’m sure I’ll be painfully rediscovering it next time because I seem to have completely forgotten! Oops. Because I’ve gotten distracted by the textile exploration class I’m supposed to be teaching at Rebecca’s class. About things like weaving and spinning and felting and dying. I’m good with dying, okay with weaving though I’m still working on some of the terminology, fine with felting, I was going to say I know nothing about spinning, but hey, I learned yesterday! And it was really fun! So today I spent a couple hours at the playground with my drop spindle. I have a lot more to learn before I can teach this stuff to K-5th though! So, basically, the egg project is doomed. Like the two patterns I thought would be finished by the end of the summer. Doooooooooooooomed! Maybe that should be the theme of my Halloween decorating? Half finished projects grave yard. Too depressing. Dooooooooom! What a great word.

Shellac. I love shellac. It is non-toxic, and it isn’t made out of plastic. What is shellac?

From Wikipedia:

Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes (pictured at right), which are dissolved in denatured alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough all-natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish.

Yes, foodglaze. You’ve probably eaten shellac, and if you are not a compulsive ingredients reader you probably never realized it. Ever had sprinkles on your ice cream? Yep.

So, hey, it’s an approved food ingredient, I’m okay with using it to finish toys that my
1yo will probably be chewing on when I’m not looking. Awesome!

When I was making some rainbow gnomes for Penelope I was experimenting with shellac so that I could give them faces with sharpie markers. Which are full of horrible solvents. I ended up leaving them classically faceless just because I liked them that way. But anyway the numbers on that picture up there are the number of coats of shellac that I put on the peg people before drawing each face.

No shellac – bleeding marker.
1 coat of shellac – not so much bleeding as gentle blurry haloing, probably as the alcohols in the sharpie diffused through the thin coat of shellac.
2 coats of shellac – hurray! No bleeding!

Right, dissolves in alcohol, so don’t go letting your toddler drop their toys in your drink.

I got the idea for these from this picture of ‘Felt Wool Cute Zakka’ from FeltCafe’s photostream. Theirs are cuter, but mine are still cute! Even if the green one looks more like she is wearing a parka than a shawl…

Rebecca insisted that since it was ‘Children’s Day’ last week (okay, so officially it was the 5th) I needed to make her a present, since she’d gotten me a present for Mother’s day. Which technically I both suggested and bought. But we are politely ignoring that. I’d just been perusing FeltCafe’s photostream and picking out my favorite inspirations, so I flipped through them and suggested a few possibilities. The smaller one is Rebecca’s, and then I had to make Penelope one so she would stop stealing Rebecca’s. I’m pretty sure that Penelope lost hers at the library within a few hours of getting it though. We’ll see if it turns up. :-/ I have learned, you see, that I need to photograph things *before* I give them to my children, or it’s all over.

Anyway. I could have used the couch time to do something productive, like work on my (2008!) photobook, or blog posts, or this doll, this doll that is currently defeating me, but I didn’t, I gave myself a break and watched 2/3 of Fruits Basket on Hulu. Woo! Anyway Anyway Anyway!

So this doll. This doll that I have been working on, since, since, lets look at my photo catalog… For FIVE MONTHS (OMG!) Okay, I didn’t think it was that bad. That’s bad, seriously bad. It isn’t the doll’s fault, there is nothing particularly difficult or complicated about it, it is that I am trying to write a pattern for it, and I am having serious problems with the RESISTANCE. Have you heard of the Resistance? Read this (guest) post on ZenHabits. It is awesome. It explains why we never finish things, and the many ways we sabatoge ourselves so that we won’t be noticed in bad OR good ways. It has become my mantra over the last year, oh, it is the resistance that is trying to distract me with that shiny new idea, it is the resistance that is trying to get me to read another blog rather than doing my work, I will defeat the resistance! But sometimes the resistance wins. More often than I probably realize or would like to admit. It really helps to have a name to call it out by though! But this doll, I am writing about it because I am GOING to finish it. Five months, eesh! When I look at this doll I feel this enormous overwhelming sense of failure, but I am going to get past this! Maybe. After I watch another few episodes of Fruits Basket?

This is something I’ve been working on for a while, soft dolls printed at Spoonflower. I managed to fit three dolls into half a fat quarter of organic jersey (which is larger than a fat quarter of quilting weight woven, happily) so I was able to order six little dolls on one fat quarter. I made one rag doll, which was my goal, that I haven’t sewn yet, and then along the bottom I fit two swaddled babies. One is the one above, that I think is okay, but I’d like to fix it up.

The other is one that Rebecca drew – I printed out an oval for her, and she scribbled a face and other bits all over it. Here she is sewing around the edges, and in quite a bit from the edges…

And here you can see her finished doll, isn’t it cute! (along with the second print that she is cutting out.) She did the cutting, and the sewing and the turning and the stuffing! I still have to thread her needles and knot them, I keep meaning to work on that with her, and I had to sew the doll shut for her because she was getting tired. Can you tell, I am so proud of her that she can sew a simple doll mostly by herself at 4?

We are visiting my inlaws in Vermont for several weeks, and in addition to an immense forest to play in they have several enormously happy and productive lavender plants which are all spewing flowers. This doll is one of the things I came up with to do with them. She is loosely inspired by Grandma Nenny’s sweet grass dolls.

Things you will need:
Fresh lavender – fresh enough to bend in half without snapping.
A wooden bead, or something round with a hole through it for the head.
String for hair and shirt
Scissors, craft glue and something to draw a face with.

First draw your face, or draw your face last, or perhaps sometime in the middle, possibly never. There are many long traditions of faceless dolls, although sometimes I think they are a bit creepy. Besides, whenever I don’t put a face on a doll Rebecca always asks and asks and asks until I put a face on them. So draw the face.

Cut some hair by looping the yarn around your hand about seven times, depending on the size of the head and the hole in it, and cut the loops. Or, you know, don’t. If you have any roving that makes lovely hair. Moss does too. And daisy hats are always in style.

Take a lavender stem, fold it in half around the middle of the hair and thread the stem down through the head.

Pull the hair down halfway through the head. If it feels quite stuck then perfect, you’ve used the right amount of hair, nevermind how it covers the fairy’s head. If it feels loose, but you don’t want to add more, you can pull it out again, put a drop of glue down the hole and pull it in again. If it doesn’t fit, you’ll just have to figure something out, probably involving either glue or knots.

Hold the hair up and put glue around the hole in a C, leaving a gap for the face.

Pull the hair down into the glue strand by strand to create an even layer all around. If you think fairies should have bangs, don’t leave a gap in the glue for the face. Or also if you think fairies should look like Cousin It. No reason to keep it all one color either, pink in front, blue in the back, or maybe striped orange and black like a tiger lilly.

On to the body, the dancing skirt, the home of the heart. Gather your lavender into a bundle, the tips of the blossoms all at the same height. You will want somewhere between 6-12 stems of lavender depending on their size and the size of the doll. This is art, not science!

Tie a knot to hold the bunch together, leaving a two inch tail on one side, and several feet or the whole ball uncut on the other. If you are thinking about proportions, the knot will be just below the finished dolls arms. The dolls I like the best have had the knot just above the top of the highest bud. The one in the picture is a bit high I think.

Bend 2-3 stalks straight out to either side just above the knot. Decide on an arm length, then bend the stalks back double and trim them 1/4″ to 1/2″ past the central stalk, so they go behind the sticking up stems and overlap the other arm a bit.

Trim the unbent stalks off at half a head height above the shoulders. So if your head is 1″ in diameter, trim the stalks off about 1/2″. The stalks should give you a little bit of neck, then go into the head and rest against the hair stuffed down the bead shaft.

Attach the head next. It’s a bit fiddly. If you like glue put a bit in the bottom of the head. Then thread the lavender stalk coming out of the head down through the knot holding the body bundle of lavender together. Keep pushing the head down and feed all of the neck lavender stalks into the neck hole of the head. Pull the body knot tight if it’s come loose. There’s nothing holding the arms bent at this point except my finger, don’t worry if they are waving wildly around, just gather them up again once the head is on.

From now to the end tuck the short tail of the yarn down with the skirt, we will want it to finish the knot at the end, so don’t loose it, just keep it out of the way. Tie two half hitches, (does that make it a full hitch?) around each shoulder to hold the arms together. Just tie two on one side, pull the yarn around behind the shoulders and tie the other two for the other arm.

At this point the doll is structurally done, and how you wrap or knot the shirt is a matter of taste. First, before you start wrapping though, give her a kiss for her heart!

For the shirt I like to wrap the yarn from the shoulder down the arm for a sleeve, then wrap back to the shoulder, cross over the body, wrap down the other arm and back up to the shoulder for the other sleeve. But leave her sleeveless if you want. Then for the body I alternate wrapping around the waist/chest once, up over one shoulder, down and around the waist, up over the other shoulder and back to the waist and around. Do that a handful of times and it will create a woven ‘V’ front. When you are done wrapping the body tie a square knot, with the original tail you’ve been saving, over her hip, in the middle, or wherever you like it. Trim the ends.

Then make another one so they can be friends. Once I finished this one I had to make a baby for her. Hugs! And now I’m feeling a strange urge to sew a felt kimono for her…

Why do tutorials always take 10 times longer than you originally think? This really is a pretty simple doll, and exactly how you do the steps doesn’t much matter, so don’t worry, go out and pick some lavender. Or grass, or some weeds. Hmm. Next I will make her a friend ‘clover’! Let me know what happens with you!

Marigold is a doll I made roughly based on the Black Apple pattern. I drew the pieces myself, changed the directions around, embroidered her face, and boxed the bottom so she would sit up. I should have stuffed her butt with beans or made it thicker… The jersey I used for her face/arms/legs is too thin unfortunately, and I think her inner leg joint is already tearing a little, because Neleepop likes to yank her around by her skinny legs, which are fabulous for grabbing.

Also, she is quite fond of poking, or smashing her eyes. But they are quite sturdy. And then there is the head biting. But then, then there is the hugging and squealing!!! So thrilling! Obviously 10 months is the perfect age for first doll love.

Rebecca has a swing in her (smallish) bedroom. I’m not sure what this says about me, or my husband that he agreed to hang it there. Anyway! It is a very tippy swing, and has been great for her balance. The other day I suggested we stack blocks on it, it was great! It turned an easy block stacking exorcise into quite a challenging one. So, if you just happen to have a tippy Ikea swing in your bedroom… no, I thought not.

Also, see those little people? Big hit. I got some peggish people, thinking I would paint them, but it turns out the smallest, ‘1-1/8″ Baby – Little People‘, are the perfect size to go with European blocks that have a basic measurement of 4cm, like Plan blocks and HABA blocks. So now they are all living with Rebecca’s blocks, and I’m not going to paint them. I think it might be a good idea to stain them different colors, because Rebecca kept getting mad at me when I would loose track of which one was ‘her’. And I might give them eyes, but probably not, and I’m definitely not going to paint them to be different community characters, because they are so much more flexible this way.

maryanne Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 9:58 am edit
I would love to give this doll to my grandmother. She collects dolls, loves pink, and could use some cheering up. And, this doll reminds me of photos of her from when she was young.

So there you go. Her underclothes could use a little new elastic, but if you don’t mind her knickers falling down I think she’s an adorable doll and I hope she cheers your grandmother up!

What to do with tiny fabric scraps from your stash? Cut interesting shapes out of them and add them to a felt board set. It will be more fun to build with because there will be more textures and patterns to play with, not just felt. You can use any kind of fabric for this, cotton, corduroy, velvet, linen… You can even use paper, and although nothing will stick on top of the paper shapes they can add a lot of interest too. The secret to using all these different materials on your felt board is to bond them to a layer of felt.

First you need a felt board though, perhaps you already have one, or they aren’t difficult to make. Just take a large piece of felt or flannel and back it with thick fusible interfacing for a roll-able board, or wrap it around a board and tack or staple or glue it for something sturdier. Here is a great and super simple travel felt board tutorial by MaryAnne at mama smiles, and a really cute felt board in frame posted by itty bitty love.

I think the fun part, and what I want to talk about here is making all the shapes. The traditional way is to cut them out of felt, which is great because it’s cheap and it doesn’t fray. But with a little craft glue or fusible interfacing you don’t have to be limited to just felt. The steps are super simple, demonstrated here in part by my three year old assistant.

Smear glue on the back of the fabric or paper. Use a craft glue that says it is flexible when dry, or I’ve also used glue sticks before to glue felt. If you are using liquid glue try to spread it quickly and thinly so it doesn’t completely saturate the fabric and felt.

Stick the paper or fabric down on top of a piece of felt.

Fold inside an ironing cloth to protect your iron from the glue and iron it flat and dry. Then cut it into an interesting shape.

If you have some fusible interfacing scraps around that have a fuzzy felty back you can skip the glue step. The thin kind of fusible interfacing I have is slippery on the back and won’t really stick to the felt board, but the thick kind I have is fuzzy on the back and works great. Just test what you have, and see if it sticks. Or you can use double sided fusible stuff, with fabric on top and felt on the bottom, replacing the glue above.

Just cover your fusible interfacing with tiny scraps, or big scraps, cover the whole thing with an expendable ironing cloth, and iron it. You will have to peel the ironing cloth off, but as long as there aren’t too large gaps between your tiny scraps it isn’t a big deal, the fusible glue isn’t that strong, especially if you peel it while it’s warm. Or you can cut up your fusible interfacing before hand to fit under your fabric scraps. If you have a lot of really tiny scraps though I don’t think it’s worth the fuss.

Then you’ll have a fast pile of interesting shapes to cut up.

Slice them and dice them into triangles, squares, circles, squiggles, splots, lines, wiggles… Oh and of course these fabric scraps make great felt person clothes. Here is a simple person pattern for making a felt doll, there are extra lines on it suggesting where to cut for shirts and short and pants, follow the outline from the waist to the hips and then flair out for a skirt, or just cut a trapezoid, felt boards are the land of imagination after all.

There are so many directions you can go with felt boards, geometric shapes, animals, people, story-boards… mama smiles has a lot more patterns for sets of felt shapes if you search her site for ‘felt board’, and there are also some cute felt shape ideas at Dundee Writer: Flannel Making Frenzy, and Chasing Cheerios: A Felt Jack O’Lantern Game.

Rebecca had as much fun cutting up the new shapes as playing with them later, so if you have a little one be sure to involve them in both kinds of play!