Making a Doll Pattern

I haven’t finished my first doll yet, but I wanted a challenge over Christmas, so decided to have a bash at making my own doll pattern (I never like to take the easy option!)….but how to go about it?

I did my initial sketches:

I want to make a faun. I have lots of ideas, I know I want to make quirky dolls from now on!

I started by making a template out of air-drying clay:

Then I removed the horns and ears and drew on the seams. I used pins and tissue paper to make templates with darts in:

I then tried it out of a cheap piece of white fabric:

This is the result. It needs a bit of tweaking (hence the pins). The purple pen lines will fade as it’s a light soluble  fabric pen.

The next steps are to do the same thing with the body and to trial both in the proper fabric….which I still have to decide on!

Doll’s Shoes

So it turns out making shoes for dolls is quite tricky. Considering I’m pretty inexperienced in sewing, I’m quite pleased with how well they fit.

It’a a dull day, so the photo isn’t great, the colours are more vivid in real life.

 

I made them using some fabric I designed myself which we had printed. You can see I still need to neaten up the stitches and there is a tiny pull in the front of one of them which I plan to cover up with a bow.

 

It’s fun messing around with patterns. I made a mock up version out of a sheet and played around with it until I had a rough design. Then I used my printed fabric.

Making Cloth Dolls

For my Mum’s birthday, I bought us both a ticket for a doll making workshop. It was great. It was run by Jan Horrox (https://janhorrox.co.uk/) over a weekend. We got the flesh coloured fabric, stuffing, some other tools and the pattern. We were encouraged to use it in any way we wanted. There was a face design you could use, but we both designed our own.

Mum and I went slowly, so we didn’t quite finish by the end of the weekend. I’ve done the arms, legs, body and hair, but I am working on the dress at the moment. I’ll add more photos once she’s finished 🙂