Little Pink Studio: Tuesday tutorial: Something different...

Hello! I hope your week has started off wonderfully. I also hope you'll bear with me as I'm still not feeling well, so this is not a step by step tutorial with photos of the process, but I will tell you how I made this little gal.

If you've been reading my blog for a long time, you might remember that I have mentioned a couple of times that years ago, when my girls were just babies I used to make dolls. All sorts of prim/country dolls specializing in santa's and snowmen. This was back before etsy, and blogs, and any sort of online possibilities to sell the things you make. So, I would just have holiday open houses, and the like and sell things in my home and to people I knew. Anyway, that was a long time ago, (my girls are almost 19 & 21 now) but every so often I feel a pull to create some kind of doll or softie. Recently I had just that feeling, so I grabbed some wool felt and decided to make something.

I didn't really have a plan, but an idea from a photo I saw a couple of years ago. The photo wasn't even of the cute little creatures, but more of a shop photo, and there were some little "dolls" on a shelf that were similar to what I made here. I have no idea where that was, or who made them, but they inspired me and I've had them in my head all this time.

I began by simply drawing a head and body shape directly onto the wool felt with a pencil, cutting those out, and stitching them together. I hand stitched as that's always been relaxing for me.

To create the face, I simply embroidered the eyes and mouth. For the nose I used a bit of wool roving and needle felted the nose in place. I then added a bit of blush to her cheeks.

When I stitched the body, I left two small openings on the sides for arms, and on the bottom for legs. Once my body was stitched and stuffed, I simply threaded a fuzzy pipe cleaner through the body and folded the pipe cleaner ends into loops for "hands". I did the same thing for the legs and "feet". Then I just stitched around the arms closing up the small openings and making sure the arms or legs would not come out.

For her skirt, I used some vintage pattern tissue paper. I made two separate skirt pieces and layered them on top of each other so that they were ruffled. I made a fold in the tissue, and on one end I used my scalloped shears to make little scallops. To sew the skirt pieces I used some embroidery thread and ran a basting stitch along the top. Then I simply tied the skirt pieces one on top of the other onto her body. I also secured with a bit of glue. Is that clear as mud?

I covered up my top seems with some vintage lace. Then I placed some vintage paper posies into her hands.

Oh, and I made her little ears with some felt and just stitched some detail on those as well. (her ears are just glued onto the back of her head)

She was really quite easy, and hopefully you can follow along without tutorial photos. I think this would be a wonderful activity to do with your child. Perhaps let them draw the shapes for you? Then you would have sweet little doll creatures based on their drawings. It would also be a great project to work on to teach some hand stitching as there really isn't that much involved.

Just a fun little project, something totally different than what I have worked on over the past couple of years, but it's always nice to stretch your creativity in different ways, don't you agree?

If you have any questions about how I made her, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'll be more than happy to help!

Happy creating! Cerri xo

PS, I have some new shop items I hope to get listed this week, and hopefully I will be feeling better and have a nice step by step tutorial for you next week.