For anyone who is considering making his or her own Waldorf doll, following are some of the details of her construction. I apologize for not having taken photos along the way! If/when I make another, I promise I will add pics.
Materials
- Wool stuffing: Typically people buy wool stuffing from somewhere like Weir crafts or an Etsy shop, but I actually just bought a 100% wool sweater from Goodwill and unraveled it. I got the idea from these two blog posts, which I'll reference a bunch below!
- http://farmishmomma.com/?p=348
- http://doingwithout.livejournal.com/30295.html
- Strong twine: You can buy this from a craft store too, but I happened to have some lying around because my mom uses it to wrap Christmas presents. It wasn't very good quality (scratchy and straw-like), but since it goes inside the skin fabric, you can't really tell
- Yarn for hair: I got this from JP Knit & Stitch, which was great because it meant that R could come with me and pick it out (she knows I'm making her a doll, but she hasn't seen it yet). I really love the color she picked-- turquoise, green, and purple are my three favorites! Maybe she picked up on my reaction to that, but what are ya gonna do ;-)
- Embroidery thread for face: I wish I'd picked a subtler color for the mouth (more of a pink than red), but I didn't want to redo it. R picked the eye color.
- Skin fabric: This I ordered on Etsy (I got dark tan). The first blog I listed above describes how you can buy your own and the second suggests using sweatshirt material, but this was something I didn't want to screw up because it's pretty obvious. Plus it's probably harder to dye your own if you want a darker skin tone, which I thought would look better with the yarn R picked for the hair. Technically you only need a 1/2 yard of this fabric, but I wound up having to buy another 1/2 yard because I messed up often enough to warrant redoing the body/head skin a couple times. If you're making your own pattern, I recommend a whole yard.
- Good quality cotton thread to match the skin color (I bought locally)
- Crochet thread to match the skin color, if you want to do bellybutton/bum. Regular thread won't be strong enough because you really have to tug it. Unfortunately I bought a really thin type of crochet thread online because it was cheap-- I didn't know they come in different thicknesses. It did break a few times, so I hope it holds up to use!
- Sewing machine with ballpoint needle (because you're dealing with stretchy fabric and it apparently helps) and needles for hand sewing: You don't NEED a machine, but holy cow this would have taken forever without. I take that back... I really think you do need a machine. There's no way I could sew strong enough seams by hand for a two-year-old's doll. I recently purchased a refurbished Brother CS6000i online and it's great. Not finicky, easy to use, not overly flashy (although there are some stitches on there that I'm sure I'll never use), and best of all, affordable!
- Doll sculpting needles: You will definitely need these. You need at least one 5" needle and one or two 3" needles will be handy too. These are used for sculpting and embroidering the face.
To make the head, I followed the instructions from the Doing Without blog listed above. This involved unraveling some of the sweater (I used the arms first, knowing I would need strips of the body later) and winding it into a ball, then using the twine to shape the head. I also wrapped a large square of unraveled sweater around the ball, which made it a tad more supple so that I could shape it better. I may have wound it too tight. The other advantage of wrapping the unraveled sweater around it was that it gave me a bit of a "neck" stem, which I then wrapped with some cotton ribbon I had lying around (I have no idea where I got it!). Anyway, that made the stem a little stiffer so the doll's head isn't wobbly. It's basically the same thing the Farmish Momma (first blog listed above) did with the cheesecloth.
I did the skin around the head the same way the Doing Without blog describes, which resulted in some not-so-attractive hand-stitched seems on the back of the head. Most of it is covered with hair now, but I will probably try to come up with a closer pattern and sew it more carefully next time.
The eyes... ohhhhh the eyes. I had to sew each one probably 4 times and ultimately redo the head skin because the fabric had so many holes from redo's. It is SO HARD to get them symmetrical!! I used several youtube tutorials as guides, but ultimately, I think it's just one of these things that gets easier with practice. I actually recommend trying it on some scrap fabric first. You have to count the ribs on the skin fabric as you go to try to get them the same width and everything... but it doesn't always work out because it stretches and so forth. Luckily, the mouth was much easier! Tip: If you come in and out from the top of the head rather than the back (with your 5" needle), the doll will have a slight smile!
The body pattern: This is where I went a little over the top. Originally I was going to use the pattern from the Doing Without blog, which maybe would have been a good idea. But I really wanted to get the type of bum that Fig & Me makes on her dolls because they are SO cute! I also like how they have actual knee caps, feet and such. The only way to get all that is to make the legs separately from the body and to actually sew the two leg pieces (and arm pieces) together vertically instead of horizontally (meaning the seams meet at the elbows and knees instead of the sides of the arms/legs. Hopefully that makes sense to people without a visual!
I will now *attempt* to describe how I came up with my pattern!
First, I found my American Girl Doll (yup, I kept it from my childhood!) incredibly helpful with this process. I like her general dimensions and I realized later that it will also be super helpful when I make clothes, because there are a TON of American Girl doll clothes tutorials on the interwebs. Also she has contoured arms and legs, which achieved the knee caps, elbows, etc. I wanted. The tricky thing was that I still needed to create a seam allowance and also account for the fact that the fabric is stretchy. So I used a flexible measuring tape and did my best to add about 0.5 in around each piece for the seam allowance. I also extended the arms and legs a bit, knowing that I would need to sew them into the body panels. I wish I had given them each an extra 2 or 3 inches-- trying to pin them on with only an extra inch was a pretty finicky process.
For the actual body shape, I again used Samantha the American Girl as a guide, but I made the back panel slightly longer than the front. This was so I could add some seat darts on her bum to make it more like the Fig & Me dolls. The seat darts give the bum a rounder shape and allow the doll to sit upright without something behind her, making it less of a rag doll. I actually found this stuffie dart tutorial helpful for this. I had to redo the body panel once because I wasn't happy with the location of the darts.
Once I had the body pattern roughly sketched out, this blog (download the free ebook and skip to page 136) came in handy to make sure she was going to be somewhat proportional. Here is the order of the body assembly:
- Sew the two arm pieces together, right sides together, leaving the top (by the shoulder) open for turning and stuffing. Same goes for the legs, but if you're doing feet, leave the bottom of the foot part open too, so you can sew the sole of the foot on after the sides (but before turning right side out). This was a little awkward on the machine, but it came out okay.
- Stuff the arms and legs: I used the process described by the Doing Without blog. It gives you the ability to bend the arms/legs at the elbows/knees a bit, which is nice. I stuffed the hands and feet first with some unwound sweater bits and also added a little bit to the knees and elbows to give them more shape. Make sure you leave the couple inches at the top open so you have something to sew to the body.
- Sew the back body panel seat darts. You kind of have to hold the fabric up as though the doll is sitting to guess where to put them. I sewed and clipped one of the darts, then folded the panel in half lengthwise to estimate a similarly placed/sized one on the other side so they were somewhat symmetrical. Like I said, I had to redo it on another piece of fabric to get the placement right, so don't be too hard on yourself!
- Sew the back and front body panels together, right sides together. Only sew the sides from where you estimate the bottom of the armpit will be and leave the bottom, where the legs will go, open. You will also sew the top edge from where the neck will start down to where the shoulder (where you'll insert the arms) will start. This will leave the neck whole open, where you'll insert the head stem.
- Once you've turned the body right side out, insert the head stem and sew around the neck, using a ladder stitch. Make sure you turn the fabric in, the way you would do if you were hemming something, around the neck of the body panel so no rough edges stick out.
- Next, start stuffing the body (I used unraveled sweater bits) around the neck, filling out the shoulders a bit, so you can get a better idea of how to position the arms. Some doll makers, such as Bamboletta dolls, sew the arms so the doll looks like it's going to hug you. I chose the more natural positioning of Fig & Me, making the arms hang gently at the sides. I pinned and ladder stitched around one arm at a time (after inserting the arm all the way into the shoulder hole and turning the body panel fabric edges in), going around twice to make them more secure. I had to redo one of them because it was turned slightly differently than the other.
- Finish stuffing the body, making sure you fill out the shoulders and neck area fully. Leave about 0.5-1 inch at the bottom un-stuffed for inserting the legs into the body. Turn the body panel edges in at the bottom and ladder stitch the legs to the body. You will also have to ladder stitch the crotch between the legs. Next time I may attach the legs with the whole body panel turned inside out, before stuffing the body and sewing the neck, etc. I think it would be too bulky to do on the machine, but at least then you can do a really solid hand-sewn stitch ahead of time. It was tricky trying to pin the legs once everything was stuffed.
- Bellybutton and butt crack (and vulva!): I used this tutorial for the bellybutton. You can just do it the way you sculpt a nose, but I liked the spiral effect! If you sew it on the way she describes, you can use your 3-5" doll needle to then come out and where the top of the bum would be and back in between the legs, pulling really tight, and tying off as close to the bottom of the bellybutton as you can get, creating a butt crack :-) I chose to go in the bellybutton, out the upper part of the bum, back in between the legs but on the back side of the crotch seam, back out between the legs but on the front of the crotch seam, and then in another inch above that, tying off under the bellybutton. Basically this created a bum and a vulva. Anatomically correct dolls might not be for everyone, but as a friend pointed out, it's confusing to have all the body parts except for the privates. I realized it kind of made it seem like a vulva is too shameful to put on a doll, which is not the message I wanted to send my daughter. Anyway, vulva optional, but that's how I did those body parts!
- Nipples: Another friend insisted that I try making nipples, which I made the same way as Doing Without describes making the nose, except of course smaller.
- Hair: I actually attached the hair before doing any sewing of the body, but I put it last because I now realize it is easier to do in this order. The hair kept getting in the way, especially when I was trying to hand stitch the neck and arms. There are several doll hair tutorials out there, but I highly recommend using the description from Making Waldorf Dolls, which luckily I found at the Boston Central Library. The one thing I did differently was I wound up sewing my bottom layer of hair right down to the base of the head (not just the crown) so less of the head skin showed through when doing "up-do's."
Phew! I think that's everything! All in all I think this took me about 3 months of working on and off. I managed to finish two months before her birthday, which was way sooner than I expected! And only a few tears were shed from frustration ;-) Happy doll-making!
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