Felt Paper Dolls - Part 2

Last week I started making felt paper dolls.  You can see part one here.  Today I want to finish what we started.  Last time, I had created a doll and one outfit, one hairstyle, and one set of shoes.

A note about these images: I used my tablet to take this pictures.  They aren't great!  I think it's partly the tablet's camera and partly the bad lighting in my laundry room.  You've been warned :)

Using the same method I used on the doll, I pinned clothing templates to felt and cut around them.  Although you could cut through multiple layers, I found that cutting one layer at a time worked best.  I wanted to work with the excess pink and purple felt in my collection.  Using a limited palette helps to create a mix-and-match wardrobe, too.

I have a lot of fun supplies hanging around, including iron-on patches and some ribbon.  Using a piece of felt, I ironed the patches on and used iron-on seam tape to add the ribbon.  Felt sticks to felt, so any item I used had to have a felt backing in order to stick to the doll.  Treat these like any other felt.  Use a template and cut out outfits.  It's a little bit tougher to cut this embellished felt, but still easy enough.

Here are two dolls, several hairstyles, and a wardrobe of mix-and-match outfits.  This is a quarter to half of each sheet of felt.  This is a super easy, super cheap little project!

For some of my items, I decided to glue pieces together.  I cut out all the pieces I wanted to glue together and organized them before getting out my glue gun.  That way, I could quickly glue everything all at once.

This is a close-up of a doll with a sweater set and jeans!  I used the felt with the ribbon and cut out a shirt.  Using the long sleeved shirt template, I cut out the sweater arms.  I glued the arms to the shirt.  I love this!

I don't really have sewing or embroidery skills and it shows here!  Using a pencil, I sketched in a face (right) and sewed in some eyes and a mouth (left).  The eyes are just embroidery floss threaded through in different directions and tied off.  The mouth is a very basic chain stitch.  Trust me, if I can do this, anyone can!  If sewing is REALLY not your thing, glue on some eyes & a mouth, or use markers.  Try different methods & see what works.

The colors aren't quite right here, but these are two completed dolls.  The doll on the right has an embellished outfit.  I took some small beads and used embroidery thread to sew them on.  I added stitching with yellow embroidery floss to the jeans so they looked more like jeans.  These were cut from the iron-on patch, but you could just as easily use iron-on seam tape and scraps of jeans from an old pair, iron it on to felt, and do the same thing.

And here's the little wardrobe!  I added beads to a few things.  I may do more embellishing before I hand these off to my nieces.

This was a fun experiment.  I still prefer paper to felt, but it was nice to think a little differently! Any questions, feel free to ask!

Hopefully I'll have a new doll up on Friday.  Halloween is a big day/night in our house, so we'll see if time allows....

Til then, have a happy, fun, safe, candy-filled Halloween!