Design inspiration from a tile on the floor of Texas de Brazil:
Yesterday I started working on a doll for my sister's kid. She likes pink and yellow right now. I used some beads I found last year, they have silver foil inside them. I'm going to have to learn how to make doll hair, because this was an extremely bad hair job. I did google adding hair to a doll and found an interesting australian woman's blog with photos of dolls she has made, and a link to a Flickr group for
Steiner dolls: I'm still not sure what Steiner dolls are, but they are definitely softer and cuter than my crude rendition of a doll, so I'm going to have to experiment.
My favorite part about this doll is the skirt, which I made using a ton of pink and yellow fabric strips that I cut from fat quarters. The strips are about eight to ten inches long, and about two inches wide at the top and four inches wide at the bottom. Then I gathered all the fabric on the top end, until the top side was just long enough to go around the waist. So there is a ton of fabric comprising the skirt. It billows out and the doll stands up all on its own - impressive considering she has one leg longer than the other.
A close-up of the beads, and the little necklace I made of beads.
This doll was fun to make. I still need to sew a little handbag using some fabric and ribbon. I bought some jelly-bellies that I am going to put inside a little plastic pouch inside the handbag, so doll will have candy to carry around in her purse (a necessity).
My niece was scared of the doll I sent because of the poorly rendered face. My other niece decided she wants a cheetah doll. My sister said, "That would be cool if you could find some fuzzy cheetah fabric." I said, "You'll be lucky if I make the body of the cheetah out of muslin and paint on some stripes with acrylic!" She told me cheetahs don't have stripes. I googled it and educated myself on cheetah coloration/marking. Then I found this great, fuzzy cheetah fabric today at Hobby Lobby!!! (Now I have to figure out what to do with it. I'm already pondering how to make the legs stick out of the body in a recognizable fashion). I suppose I could get a pattern for making a stuffed animal, but what would be the fun in that? My niece wants marbles for the eyes, but I found some green plastic "animal eyes" at the store so I'll stick those in, and I'm thinking of putting in some kind of wire form for the legs and neck and tail. But I'll have to go back to the craft store for that. YAY! THE CRAFT STORE!
