Arg! I am so behind! I haven't posted for a while...but I have excuses! Good excuses, no...but plenty of bad ones make up for one good one, right?
First, my awesome sister, M Jr came to visit from Ohio for a week. And we crafted it up! Oh, if you could see my tiny house now! What with paper and yarn and boxes of crafts everywhere! It is fabulous! Ok, really, it is a mess. Not that M Jr left it crazy tornado style when she had to go home...but that I have been feverishly crafting it up since she left. M Jr is like a gigantic source of inspiration for crafting. She has acquired all kinds of crafty knowledge in her comings and goings in life. She is so inventive when it comes to crafting! She can give you all kinds of tips, tricks, and variations on everything! She is the reason I can never throw away a cereal box. Now she is the reason I can never throw away plastic packaging.
Come to think of it, I would like to blame her for me being a craft acquiring junkie. (I hear her protests to this in my brain right now! I only reintroduced you to crochet, but what have you done to me, with stamps, and paper, and ink, and embossing powder, and shrinky dinks, and heat guns, and unfinished wood projects! The list could go on and you know it!) When I die, it will be in an avalanche of various craft supplies...and it will be all M Jr's fault! (Book her, boys!)
But I digress. So I made M Jr's presents, as is the custom. The first is this scary frog...which I almost didnt' give to her, becuase it is a little scary to me. (But she liked it. She is weird.)
Originally, I had intended to do something a little different, which I will explain in a minute. But that didn't happen, so here is lone creepy frog. I figure she could use him as a pin cushion or something.
I also made a broomstick crochet bracelet for her, as seen here, modeled by the creeper frog:
He wears it well.
Finally, the thing I am most excited about. The first real deal stuffed toy I designed myself. (I do not count things made out of felt. Don't ask me why. It's none of your business. What did you call me? I defend my honor, sir. I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL!!! *I slap you with my dueling glove.* I hope we can still be friends.) Anyway, nothing too challenging at first, a simple doll:
I am so ridiculously proud of it! I really like the simple face (the eye buttons are so cool...but they were the only two I had like that. Now they have gone on to a better, nobler life. Fare thee well, most perfect buttons ever!) and the felt shoes. Also, I do like the dress material. It was a fat quarter I have had sitting around for a while. Actually I had two of them. Now the other one is lonely. I really wish I could just wear fat quarters around town. I know, you are saying I could cut them up and make clothes (you monster!) but I really like them just how they are. If you see a crazy lady walking down the street with fat quarters randomly pinned to her regular clothes, its just me. (but you are welcome to drop some change in my coffee cup either way)
As you can see in the picture (I hope), this doll has bent arms. Which is where the "what I was going to do with the creepy frog" comes in. At first, I was going to make the doll hold the frog in her hands (note the frog crown) and make a little card that said "So you mean if I kiss him he turns into a prince? I think I'll just keep the frog instead." M Jr would have gotten a kick out of that. She would have definitely just kept the frog. But I disliked the frog ever so much! M Jr said she really liked the frog (possible lie to save my feelings) but she was happy I didn't do that because the frog and doll have really separate styles and they would have clashed. I think it was cause she liked the doll, but wanted to burn the frog when she got home. That is just my guess though.
For anyone that wants to know, here is how I designed my doll:
First, I drew a couple pictures in my sketchbook a while ago with the "no way I want this frog to become a prince" idea in mind. When I figured out which one I liked the best/was simplest, I free handed various body parts onto construction paper. (Which I always buy and rarely use. I don't know why I do that. I have possible construction paper ocd.) Of course, you are welcome to use what you have on hand...be it freezer paper or toilet paper...whatever works for you. The good part about doing things this way is that you can play with the layout of the body parts to get it right. For instance, originally I had a shorter torso, and it looked kinda wonky, so I just cut a new one and there you go.
This plan also worked well for the felt shoes. Because while the construction paper shoes match up with the feet exactly, when you sew the feet, you have the loss of the seam allowances. Because felt doesn't fray, you don't need seam allowances (I just whipstiched them together). Therefore on the finished doll, the shoes fit on the feet snug and exactly. In theory, this would have worked for the hair too, had I made it out of felt as was plan A. But I had slightly not enough of the color felt I had wanted to use for the hair, and as it happened, I had the soft bulky yarn in my stash. I am happy with the yarn hair, although in the future, I really want to try the felt hair thing...as yarn hair doing is a pain in the po-po (and my least favorite part of doll making by far).
I will tell you about the little clay dealies in the top of this picture in a future post. Anywho, I hope this little instruction on how I did the doll pattern will help somebody. It is a really simple way to make up your own pattern, and probably there are a million different and better versions elsewhere online...but now you have my two cents on it. Actually, I have a future post plan for a felt doll tutorial that you can do with kids in the works, but I was kinda hoping my sister Teddy would let me borrow her step-daughter as proof that kids can do this...or I may ditch that plan and you will have to use your own kids (or borrowed kids as I would have to do) and prove it to yourselves. Just for the record, if you borrow kids, you have to ask the parent/gaurdian first...otherwise, its called kidnapping, not borrowing.
I have so many more excuses ready for why I haven't posted in a while, but this post is getting kinda long...so here's looking forward to part two.
Recent Comments