As regular readers (hello, how are you?) know, I have been a bit obsessed with doll’s doll’s dolls.
I thought you might like to have a go yourself.
You will need : a face coloured bead, thickish thread, very fine silk thread, a bit of ribbon, scissors that cut right up to the edge, tacky glue or similar clear-drying glue, Fraycheck or similar liquid anti fray. Fraycheck all cut ribbon edges and allow to dry before working. You can speed up the drying by blotting on a tissue.
Everything depends on the size of bead which is the head of the doll. Mine is a wooden, uncoated, 3mm bead. The thicker thread (mine is stranded embroidery thread) should be the colour arms and legs you want and should be able to go through the bead and be secured with one knot on the top of the bead.
Doing small knots can be tricky with just your fingers, when you have done the loop, fine tweezers can go through the loop and, hanging on to the end, pull it back through the loop for you, thus making the knot. You could practise, if you like practising things.
When the knot is a top knot, apply a little dab of glue to keep it there. Under the head, across the emerging stranded neck, now knot another length of thread, going sideways, to make arms. Knot and glue the ends of the arms. Divide the stranded thread that goes through the head under the arms to make legs and knot and glue each leg at the end to make feet.
I have additionally made a face with a fine marker pen. You don’t have to have a face at all, if you don’t want to. It will still look like a doll when you’ve finished. As you can see, I have also taken a length of 3mm wide white silk ribbon, folded it in half, sewn a seam up the back, turned it inside out with my tweezers to hide the join and just caught the bit that will go between the legs with a couple of stitches.
Using my tweezers I have inserted the legs through what is now the knicker legs and left the thread attached so I can sew the knickers to the knot in the thread which has now become the body of the doll. You can also see that at this point the stranded embroidery thread is stronger than anything else and pointing wherever it likes. Currently the doll looks like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Don’t worry, we can correct posture with a bit of thread (this is where dolls are so superior to people. All I can say is all those who have spent their formative years hunched over and scrolling will know all about it later.)
Here is the silk floss that I used, you can see the thickness of it in relation to the bead. If you don’t have the right thickness, twist thinner thread until you get there, or remove strands from thicker thread.
Night Fever, Night Fever, we know how to do it…
And the 3mm silk ribbon relative to the size of the doll. Select your knicker ribbon according to the size of your doll, You don’t have to do knickers but after 35 years of making dolls I can promise you that the moment you show the finished doll to anyone, they will immediately turn it upside down to see if it has knickers. The knickers, once sewn on, also keep the legs going down rather than Travoltered.
Now for a dress. I have used a little bit of frill edged ribbon. Any soft ribbon that is easy to bend round the doll and is wide enough to cover from the doll’s neck to the ankles will do. Hold the ribbon against the doll to see where the doll’s arms will emerge and make two cuts down to where the waist will be.
Insert the arms into the holes, turn the doll over, fold in one Frayckecked edge and sew the dress up the back. I have sewed closer at the top and made the fold lesser from the waist down to make a skirt.
Once the back is closed sew over the top of the ribbon at the shoulders to make the shoulders of the dress.
Finally I oversewed round each arm hole, going round twice to neaten the edges up and hide any staining from the Fraycheck. Most anti-fray liquids stain slightly. In twelfth scale you can hide stains in the seams. In smaller scales you have to get creative. You can also cut fabrics a bit bigger than needed and cut the stained edge off, depending on your scissors and your skill using them. One of the advantages of smaller scales is that you are only using tiny bits of ribbon to being with, a fresh half an inch won’t break the bank.
Select some hair from whatever you have to hand. Old thread, tumble dryer fluff, something the right colour off the carpet…
Grasp the neck to hold the head still, apply glue to the top of the head
stick the hair on, trim as required, squeeze a bit harder to make the knot under the head disappear and et voila! a doll.
Mine is a centimetre and a bit tall and was designed to go in the pocket of a 24th scale porcelain girl for whom I had made a pinny with a pocket. For some reason, mainly because I had the garage box at hand and empty, here they are visiting a garage. My little girl is one of the newer ten part porcelain dolls at just over an inch and a half.
If you would like to have a go and don’t have the right thread for sewing it all together, you can buy Japanese silk thread from the big river retailer and various other places but it can cost a minimum of £20 a reel, which makes an almost free doll quite expensive. So if you email me by clicking on ‘Leave a comment’ below asking for the colour of fine silk thread you would like and your name and postal address in the UK I will send you a length of very fine silk thread in one or two colours of your choice for free. I use size 12 sharps needles with the very fine silk thread, you can find them online or in most sewing shops.
If you do manage a doll or two and can email me a photo of your doll I will put it here for the world to admire.
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