Two Different Fancy Nancies

For a brief moment, I have two Fancy Nancies. Tomorrow morning one flies off to her new home. The other I will finish photographing and list on Etsy. 

Up until now I have only carried a jointed Fancy Nancy. She is extra fancy and a bit more expensive because a jointed doll takes longer to make.

But I will soon be listing the rag doll version of Fancy Nancy. She will also come with an extra outfit (Fancy Nancy style), I have a few ideas, but haven't decided yet (why hurry such a fun decision?). 

Until then.....here are a few photos from today's Fancy Nancy photo shoot.

Sister dolls

I recently received two custom requests for my African American doll with the fun braids. One request was a for a jointed Baby Egg and one was for a toddler Phoebe doll. They look like sisters who are maybe 18 months apart.

The hair for this doll is done by wrapping wool yarn as though casting on for a knitting project at the end of each braid. Then I take the ends of the yarn and with a needle weave them back through and cut them.

I thought it would be fun to do a photo shoot before the ends were woven in—Medusa style.

Soon they ship off to different homes.

Phoebe doll before her hair is finished.

Sisters dolls!

The Ups and Downs of Prototyping

Almost every doll and softie maker has been there. It starts with an image, imagined or inspired from something real. An image of something that does not exist yet—maybe a doll, an animal, a doll dress. It has to be designed and a pattern has to be created. A process that involves lots of paper, lots of cloth and sometimes a copier for scaling. The pattern is necessary because this image rarely becomes your vision on the first try and you will need a starting point from which to tweak. 

So you tweak, and you tweak, and you tweak. You produce iteration after iteration. What propels you is that you have now invested serious time and materials and you imagine that you are creeping closer. Sometimes you are. You turn that last iteration right side out and have hit that eureka moment, when your vision has become real. You are holding your vision in your hands.. It was time well-spent. You gather your pattern pieces, because you will be sewing this again and again. Yay! Life is good.

But this is not always the prototyping path. It is not always a happy ending. Sometimes the ending is a dead-end. At some point, reality hits you and you start to realize, maybe this is not a wise investment. You reluctantly cut your losses.

When this happens, as it did to me this week-end, I need to realize this dead-end was also a worthy investment. An experiment that had to be explored. I wouldn't have known what could not be done until until I tried. And inevitably, when this happens, and it has more than once,  I learn something new about sewing, or the materials, or pattern-making, or my psyche.

But first I'm in a bit of a funk, feeling like I wasted a lot of time. I throw away all the pieces, clean my studio, strip it of the evidence, so when i start tomorrow, I can think about what is ahead and not lament.

I tried to make a floppy toddler doll. I thought it would be sweet, but I could not get the felt to cooperate at that scale. I did make at least a half dozen iterations of a floppy toddler doll, each a tweak better than the last, but none were good enough to leave my house.

And I did get something out of it—this blog post. I would love to hear the ups and downs of prototyping from the rest of you makers out there. Misery loves company.

Slow is Good

I had a great day.

I took the day off from my day job today. That means I had the school day to sew, stuff, blog, knit, clean, catch up, there were many possibilities.

I spent the seven hours turning, stuffing and ladder stitching two and a half dolls. Two and half dolls that were already stitched together yesterday. For those of you who make dolls, you are familiar with turning, stuffing and ladder stitching.

They are slow--these activities cannot be rushed.  But that is part of their attraction. Although to those who don't create, it would appear that creativity propels this process. Creativity is one ingredient. But those who make things by hand, the main attraction is the actual making. The slow, often methodical, process of carefully putting bits together, whether it is stitches in a hand knit sock or the meticulously threaded hair on a doll's head, is what we love. And it is often these slower more mundane activities that allow the time for our more creative ideas to percolate. 

To those who aren't into it, it probably sounds painstaking. For those of you who craft, most likely you feel as I do, this is relaxing, joyful, and why you do what you do. 

It is the zen of crafting. 

I love my slow days.

The Doll Book

I learned to sew at age eight and started right away making people clothes. I made a dress for my little sister. She was not as appreciative as I hoped she would be and so I moved on to sewing my own clothes. But I spotted this book somewhere, somehow (without an internet) and begged for it. It is called "The Doll Book" and it really was the THE doll book, since I knew of no others. I loved it and made many of the dolls and the clothes. I still have it and I still think it is cool .

It gives you the patterns for a family of dolls--parents, older siblings, younger siblings and a baby. I made them all. The patterns are Barbie sized and I love the way old Barbies are inter-mingled in the photos. It also gives you hundreds of period clothing patterns. You could historically dress your little dolls in outfits from the early 1800s on through to the early 1900s. 

The book would be fun for any child who wants to try doll-making. The dolls are simple and flat and the instructions for the clothing are amazing.

Used copies are still available on Amazon. Starting at about a dollar.

DIY Knitted Babes Kit: Easy to Do and Easy to Win

The dolls in the "Knitted Babes" book are so easy and fun to make, you will soon be addicted, which is fine, because there are enough materials in this kit to make at least four. 

The book "Knitted Babes--Five Dolls and Their Wardrobes" by Claire Garland (see my interview in the earlier post), amazing photos and easy instructions

• Two skeins of skin colored of Merino Yarn
• Two skeins of hair yarn (blond and black
• Felt for Eyes
• Floss for their eyelashes (important)
• Four fresh fun fabrics like the ones in the book
• Two cotton yarns for knitted clothing
• Three fun trims

How to Win?

Comment under this post before January 30, 2014. I'll pick a comment from the random number generator. I need to know how to contact you, you can contact me privately.

And if you win, this will be coming your way, soon in the mail.

The book and materials for the babes clothes.

Hair, eyelashes, skin and eyes.

Two of my Knitted Babes.

Happy Day!

New wool, new dolls, new year. All good.

Trying to resurrect a bad hair day.

Today was a bad hair day. I decided to give up on two wefted mohair wigs I started for two dolls on Thursday. I abandoned the project after hours and hours of work, but I have convinced myself this is not a complete loss.

I'll explain.

The black wefted mohair wig was created from a beautiful soft wefted mohair, that I had spiraled and carefully stitched into a wig that I was completely proud of. I thought it was perfect for an Asian doll. I even sewed it on to the doll.

However, it shed. Not terribly,  but enough to make me nervous.  It's one thing for a pale blond wig to shed a bit, blonde hair will not make a doll's skin look grungy, but the black mohair strands on skin colored wool felt, let's just say it is not a good look. The more I brushed and plucked, the more I noticed. I tried washing the wig, shaking it, combing it and finally stitching in a head band. The doll looked pretty good (see photo), but there still was a slow steady stream of mohair migrating onto her skin.

I decided to cut my losses. I did not want to create and sell a doll that I would worry would shed and make an owner miserable. 

The second wig, a strawberry blondish color, was never right in the first place. It never made it to a doll's head. The hair just didn't fall right when I tried. I played with hairstyles for a bit before realizing , all the hairstyles were just trying to compensate for some flaws in the long run I could not live with.

Yes, it is frustrating to have wasted so much time (and money wefted mohair is expensive), but I feel relieved. This failure with wefted mohair has taught me a few things:

1. Dark wefted mohair on wool felt dolls won't work.

2. No amount of work will remedy this fact.

3. I don't need to worry whether a future doll owner will complain or how I will describe the delicate hair situation on Etsy. I won't need to.

4. I am happy to have faced this doll-making truth at this stage rather than as a complaint.

5. I have plenty of other hair options, I do not need to revisit this.

6. In addition, I have learned how to make wefted mohair wigs, if I make another, It will be blond.

Most importantly, I revisited the fact, that any crafter knows, which is that part of crafting, is knowing when to cut your losses. and that failure is part of any craft.

I would love to hear about other crafters experience with cutting their losses or with wefted mohair.

Making Babies

After designing Phoebe, the big sister doll, it was not long before she felt lonely without a baby sister. I set out to design a baby doll. I thought we'd have a baby in no time. Babies are smaller, simpler and the 1950s produced many baby doll patterns with a three dimensional head. 

Baby Sasha doll

Two months and many iterations later, I had learned that capturing the essence of a baby in a hand made jointed baby doll was more difficult than designing an upright post-toddler girl. I used the Sasha baby dolls as a model. Their arms and legs have a curve to them that beams baby.

The baby's face and hair were the next challenge. I've noticed that the best baby faces are simple and understated. My first baby had large eyes. Babies' eyes are relatively large, but on a doll that looks martian like. My latest crop of babies have small eyes. 

Egg's hair is a bit amplified. Babies don't have a lot of hair, but most girls like their dolls to have hair. 

Egg now.