Christine Sews

Sewing the doll hair onto the doll took many hours.  I am not really skilled in a making a nice hair-like pattern with the yarn.  So she had bald patches and bumps on her head that I had to stitch back over to smooth out and make look nice.   Though in the end, the hair came out okay.

I used a crooked darning needle and soft wool-blend yarn.  The gross-grain ribbon is attached with a machine zig-zag stitch for durability.

Here is the doll, partially assembled and stuffed.  The crazy looking tool to the right is a hemostat, ordered from Dollmakers Journey .   I had never heard of using one for making dolls or sewing until I read Stitched in Time , by Alicia Paulson.  So far as I knew hemostats were giant weird tweezer-like things for medical use only.

Well, the hemostat is very helpful.  I’m glad I took the authors advice and didn’t try to stuff the skinny doll arms and legs without one.

If you want to teach a child to sew, make a doll.  This doll is from another Alicia Paulson pattern.  You can see where I have embroidered her face, and serged her together.   I want the embroidery floss to be very short, to prevent showing through.  So I used an old trick and burnt it to keep it from fraying or slipping out.