Clothes Pin Dolls

Here's a peek at our clothes pin dolls. We had quite a mess going with all kinds of glues, needles and thread, scissors, ribbons, yarns and fabrics all over the kitchen table top. I think the greatest thing that came out of the experience is that The Bug learned to use a needle and thread for the first time. Now she keeps asking when she gets to sew again.

That opens up a lot of new options for projects for her. Saturday we worked with a lot of pinks, grays and greens. All the clothing took a real fall/winter feeling since we had a lot of success using felted wool scraps.

The first thing we did was paint the heads a flesh tone color and drew on the faces. While the faces dried we painted shoes on all of them. I went with all black and The Bug went with pink, purple and blue. While the shoes dried we drew on small faces with a fine tip permanent gel pen.  Next we sewed skirts by gathering cut pieces of fabric scraps. We glued on trims as we went along. After that we created our tops, then added belts and other design elements. Lastly we did the hair. Here are The Bug's finished dolls.

I love The Bug's hair choices, styling and the bangs. So awesome and not traditional. Love that she mixed them up and that they look so cool and edgy. We learned late in the process that school glue was not very helpful and fabric glue was a much better way to go. Wasted a lot of time on school glue because I didn't think I had any fabric glue. When I did find the fabric glue things were much less frustrating and moved a lot faster and easier. Here are my three ladies.

My ladies have some pretty serious dark brown locks. I definitely need to give them a haircut of some kind but I felt like at least for today they wanted to have long, crazy hair. I realized all that dark hair also really hides the clothing design, so maybe they need their hair up in a bun or something.

This was a fun project, but one that took some patience. It's pretty time consuming and mess making. But it was fun to learn how to create usable patterns to form fit the clothing, add sleeves, trims and ribbons. That will definitely make things move more smoothly the next time. Yes, we still have that whole bag of craft clothes pins to use up. Haa-haa. If you've made clothes pin dolls, again, I would really love to hear about them and see photos. Cheers!

Later The Man made a clothes pin doll. I love it. See it here. You can see the projects that inspired us here.