Biscuit's House

Dollmaking from mother to daughter

  Not surprisingly, since she's so often seeing me do it, Puni had been after me for a while to teach her to knit, crochet, sew...basically she wanted to do something with a needle. It started when I was making Taffy, and I gave her a discarded lemon-shaped head to play with. She drew its features with pigma pens (if I had know we'd keep it, I'd have coated the head with Createx first to keep the colors from bleeding). Another lemonhead served as its torso, and then as she clamored for the doll to be finished, I sewed basic leg and arm shapes and gave her some polyfill to stuff them. I attached the arms and legs using elastic thread so they can move up and down.

She made most of the dress herself. She's not six years old yet so I thought we'd start with felt, meaning no hems and no need for a very sharp needle. I told her many times to be very careful with the needle, to move the needle away from herself when pulling thread, and I haven't allowed her to work on the dress when I wasn't near her.

If you want to adapt this dress to your child's doll, it's very easy to do even if you have minimal sewing skills, use a paper towel, drape it on the doll, mark the top, side and bottom edges, remove the towel, draw the shapes and just add a seam allowance on the sides.

I didn't think Puni would be up to learning applique yet, so we used buttons to secure the felt decorations on the dress. Her stitches are still quite wild, but she's been very intent and concentrated, spent a long time stitching in a single sitting, and I'm quite impressed with the result! So without further ado please meet Belle Rose.

Here's how I made her hair. I measured the length from the top of her forehead to the base of her nape : 7 cm. Then I measured the length from the top of her head to her feet : 25 cm. I used a 30 cm high piece of cardboard (anything around 25 cm high would have done) and wound yellow cotton yarn around it a dozen times , cut the loops at the top, and repeated the process until I had lined up the hair on my table up to a height of 14 cm (7 cm x 2).

I have saved a couple of such cardboard pieces  from Amazon boxes and find them handy to make hair loops. Then when all the hair was lined up, I secured it with adhesive tape on both sides of the center,  marked the center line with vanishing pen, then taped the hair to a piece of tissue paper, and sewed the center line on the sewing machine using yellow thread.

Then I removed the tissue paper and tape, folded the hair in 2 horizontally so that its thickness would be doubled, and pinned it on the head.

To sew the hair on the head I used a long needle, insterted the needle in the back of the head, and came up at the center top of the forehead just where the hair begins, leaving a yarn tail in the back. From here hubby is taking the photos so they are out of focus!

Then I sewed the hair along the center part using back stitch, starting and ending with an additional back stitch in order to secure the yarn.

Finally, I pulled both yarn ends and cut them close to the fabric, then rubbed the holes left by the needle with its blunt end in order to make them disappear. All that remains is to braid the hair and trim the ends.

Puni is very happy with her doll, and hopefully when she grows up she'll at least know how to sew buttons. 

 

Miss Loveday Lemon

I finally finished the doll from this book by Corinne Crasbercu. I'm quite happy with the result, but it's been another day of unsatisfactory photos. I plan to make her clothes though so there will be plenty of opportunities for better photos later.

I made her entirely out of my stash. The book calls for an antique bedsheet but I didn't have one, so I made her out of tea-dyed coton cashmere, which gives her a nice soft feel. A while ago my mother gave me an old cotton sheet so one day I'll make a smaller one using the sheet fabric. I stuffed her with Airtex Premium fiberfill. Her legs have some lumps but I was able to stuff her head, arms and torso in a nice uniform way. Her hair is too thin, but I started making it on a Sunday and the yarn shop was closed. Since I was using thinner yarn than in the book (though it was hard to tell at first from the photos as the book didn't specify the yarn thickness) I should have used more strands, I will know it for next time.

Her nose gave me trouble, it was my first bullion stitch. I don't have a millinery needle and didn't want to order on the net and wait for delivery, so I used a normal needle. My first stitch was a total failure, the second attempt looked like it would end the same way, but by pulling the thread from both ends it ended up more or less acceptable. Wouldn't look good in a rose, but for a nose it's good enough. Loveday already suffered a mishap - while I was stuffing her body the top of one of her legs was torn open (I had sewn it too close to the fabric edge). I repaired it by hand and it shows but it will be covered by her underwear.

To make her hair, the book said to align the strands, tape them in the center on both sides with adhesive tape, put tissue paper on the bottom and then sew over the tape with a sewing-machine. Didn't  work well at all for me - it was very hard to remove the tape once it had been sewn over, and it ripped the stitches apart. So I decided for my next attempt to tape on both sides of the center, and to sew between the taped parts, which worked much better.

I was nervous about embroidering her eyes, but they turned out all right, though not perfectly symmetrical. To place her features I used bits of felt to decide on placement and then cardboard templates that I outlined in chako pen.

When I was finished I gave the bits of felt to Puni and she played with them and leftover yarn and a rejected lemonhead from when I made Taffy.   

So far I have found 4 other blogs with dolls made from the same pattern :

Un autre jour

and

Patia Création

and

Le bricolage de Florence

and

Le blog de VJ

If you know of others, please tell me. I love to see how others have interpreted a pattern that I used myself. On Flickr I found three dolls made from the same pattern as Anzu (apart from Soph's original of course) : here and here and here. I haven't seen yet any doll made from the same pattern as Taffy so if you know one please let me know. 

One of those days

I spent hours trying to take photos, finally moved outside as I was going nowhere inside the house. Very cloudy and grey afternoon, then it started to rain. I'm very dissatisfied with the photos but I've had enough and don't think I'll try again next week-end.

It's a dress I started a year ago for another doll. I had only the bottom and collar trims to finish. I still have some thread tails to secure and the buttons to sew. 

I hadn't crocheted in small scale for a long time and it took me a while to get used to it again.

She's done

Ups and downs. This is definitely a down (there was a big down a couple of days ago but the end result is somewhere in the middle). Anzu was an up - she was one of these rare projects where everything goes just the way you envisioned and ends up even better than you dared to hope. This one - no name yet - she gave me so much trouble.

The only thing I had to do was make her body, fairly simple, right? (she's a Susan Fosnot "doll start"). I ordered the kit after seeing an article in one of the numerous doll magazines I subscribe to. When it arrived I was busy with other things and set it aside for a while. Then Carol send a photo of the kit she ordered after seeing mine and, ungenerous creature that I am, I liked hers better than mine, was jealous, and therefore left my kit in a drawer.

The other day I decided it was time to give her a body. The cutting and sewing was OK. The trouble began with the stuffing, as I was saying the other day. Somehow I managed to stuff and attach everything more or less well. The only thing left was to paint the hands, and then things really went downhill. When painting Taffy's face I had had good results drawing faint lines with a Pigma pen and shading them with very diluted pink-orangey acrylic paint. I thought I would use the same tactics to draw the lines between the fingers, but I made a big mistake - I forgot to apply Createx to the fabric first. When I drew my first line with a brown Pigma pen it bled horribly into the fabric. I should have given up then, gone to bed and slept on it. But I hate leaving something in an undesirable state, and endeavoured to fix it. I painted over the horrible bleeding line with flesh-colored acrylic paint, applied Createx and drew and painted the lines on both hands.

But the result was very unpretty. The lines were too thick, the paint the wrong color, not diluted enough. The hands looked horrible and I tried to undo everything. Using Q-tips and water I was able to erase most of it except for the first horrible line and a thick line on the other hand. I tried every solvent in the house, to no avail. I thought the hands were horrible, the doll a complete failure, bawled my eyes out and went to sleep at 3 am. Feeling so stupid for crying over such a small matter and for depriving myself of much-needed sleep. But before going to bed I remembered about my Prismacolor pencils and saw a very faint glimmer of hope.

The "light peach" Prismacolor pencil is a life-saver. It blends in perfectly with flesh-colored fabric and hides mistakes very nicely. Yesterday evening after work I went over both hands with the peach pencil and coated them with Createx, then I began again with an almost clean slate. I used only Prismacolor pencils to draw the lines between the fingers and it looks much better ; I wish I had thought of it at the beginning. The hands are not the bee's knees but at least they don't ruin the whole doll anymore for me.

When one thinks of the time, efforts and drama it took to achieve a pair of poorly drawn hands, and looks at the minutely painted minuscule head, the mind boggles.

By the way, the ripple throw is very far from completion yet, but it looks like I'm going to get good mileage out of it as a backdrop for photos.

Little limbs

Sometimes I feel like a butcher.

You'd think that a small doll would be easier to stuff than a big one, but no. I must have spent at least an hour on the first leg, redid it 2 or 3 times. I'm using Airtex premium and I guess it would have been even harder with the stuffing I was using before.

In this photo the Airtex premium is on the left and the Glorex stuffing is at right. The Airtex seems to be flufflier, less streaky, but it's still not  the secret weapon I was waiting for that would make stuffing less of a struggle.

Today is Mother's day. This morning Puni dressed up as a "servant" and brought me "breakfast" in bed. It was just some of her dinette playthings arranged on a tray, but maybe in a few years I'll have real breakfast in bed for Mother's day.

Then she gave me her present : a card with a song and poem inside, and a small frame with her photo in it. I know it's corny but when she sang the mother's day song to me I couldn't repress the tears.

The other day I had a surprise that wasn't as welcome. When I came back from work on Friday evening I thought her bangs looked weird, but I just supposed she had swept them to the side. Then I looked again, asked what she had done and she confessed that she had cut her bangs herself. She had hidden the hair in the fireplace so that I wouldn't find out but of course I found out. I don't know what came over her, she had never done such a thing before. I was more flabbergasted than angry, I think she's punished enough with the way she looks now.

Anzu

Finally, Anzu is done, down to thread tails secured and buttons sewed (things which I usually can't be bothered to do until months after I've "finished" something - if ever). One thing remains - I need to find a way to secure the buns on her head other than pinning them, so that Puni can play with her. I'd prefer not to glue them on as ideally I would like to keep open the possibility to restyle her hair a different way. Any ideas? Puni said to sew them on and I'll try to figure out how to do that.

I also would have liked to blush her cheeks but I have no idea how it will look on crochet so I need to make a swatch to try it. I also thought of needle felting small circles of pink wool but it would probably ruin the crochet around the cheeks, maybe I'll try it on a swatch as well.

The light wasn't very good today. I can't take anymore photos as it's raining now. Maybe another time I can take better ones.

I am grateful to Soph for taking the time and trouble to write down her lovely free amigurumi doll pattern. Without it I'd never have had the idea for this doll which would have been a pity.

She was made entirely from my stash, nothing new bought to make her (though I did buy more of the same yarn later for the ripple blanket). I could have used orange or red buttons for her dress and may change them one day if I have the courage (probably not).

Now that she's as complete as she's ever likely to be, I thought I'd record a few notes about her making.

Hair

I had two choices for her skin color, white or beige. In the end I chose beige, thinking I'd make her an Asian girl, and a two-tails hairstyle kind of imposed itself. Rooting the hair was time-consuming because it's not easy to root a straight line on a crocheted spiral. I wrapped yarn around the lid of a wooden box many times and cut it in order to obtain hair strands of uniform length. I used the shorter side of the same lid to cut hair for the bangs.

I folded each strand in half and used a small hook in order to attach the hair just like you attach fringe on a scarf. I first did the center part, starting from the center of the forehead, down to the nape. I did 2 parallel rows, and in each stitch I attached 2 strands, in order to hide the scalp as much as possible. Trying to make the part as straight as possible meant that sometimes I had to insert my hook in the middle of a stitch instead of in a hole between stitches.

After that I did the hairline, one side first from the forehead center to the nape, and then the other side as symmetrically as possible. Again I rooted 2 strands in each stitch and sometimes had to "split" a stitch with my hook in order to avoid rooting in a zigzag. I did the bangs last, along the straight part of the forehead hairline. There was still some scalp showing, so I used 2 strands of yarn on a needle to back-stitch along the center part and along the top of the bangs. The amount of hair by now was sufficient, so I didn't root any strands on the scalp between the part and the hairline.

Then the fun part came - styling. I separated 12 plugs from the center part on each side (each plug having 2 folded strands, that is 4 hairs) and braided them (to give even more details, I took my 12 plugs starting from the 5th plug from the front of the center part). I then tied the pig-tails using the rest of the hair, leaving 12 strands free at the front on each side of the center part (6 strands from the center part and 6 strands from the forehead hairline). I braided these 12 strands then folded the ends under the top of each thin braid and tied them with ribbon to create loops (before tying the ribbon I slid in vaguely Chinese-looking decorations I bought a long time ago at Entrée des Fournisseurs). The last thing was to coil the fat braids I had made at the beginning into buns and to pin them on the head in order to hide the scalp that was showing. I left the bangs to hang loose on each side (at first I had planned to cut the bangs short but I was too chicken to do it).

Face

I had read that it's hard to embroider on crochet so I was nervous. I had considered gluing felt features instead but I really wanted the embroidered look. First I cut some felt pieces in different shapes and sizes for the eyes and mouth (in appropriate colors) and played around with them until I was happy with their look and placement. Then I held each felt feature with one hand and traced its outline with the other hand using a chako pen (vanishing ink pen). Not too easy to trace on crochet but you can draw enough of a guide to help you with the embroidery. I did the outline of the eyes in outline stitch (3 strands of brown embroidery floss) and the irises in black satin stitch. I'm not too happy with her right iris but it will have to do. I redid the mouth twice and am now satisfied that for me, the right way is to do the line between upper and lower lip first in outline stitch (I tried to make it curve up a bit at the ends so that she wouldn't look too gloomy) and to do each side of the upper lip separately, then the lower lip, in satin stitch.

Body

Nothing really to say about the body, I just followed the pattern. I used mattress stitch to attach the head to the body which makes it really neat and easy. The only thing I changed is, I did the tops of the legs in spirals instead of rounds.

Dress and shoes

Nothing much to say either, I changed only 2 things :
- I added a decorative pink chain stitch above the frill at the bottom of the dress
- the dress was too tight so I worked in straight rows all the way instead of in the round, and I added plackets in the back for buttoning.
The shoes are very cute but the reverse crochet border was too hard for me so another time I'd probably just do a slip stitch border. And for the pink frill inside the dress, I found crocheting into the back legs of the stitches a bit hard too. Another time I'd just crochet into the front loops only for one row (or back loops only, depending which side you're working on), and then use the free loops inside to attach the frill.

I won't tell you how many hours I spent making this doll (I don't want to know myself), but all in all I'm very pleased with Anzu - even if I could sell her I don't think I would!

Anzu's dress

I have finished Anzu's dress today. I think it looks nice and I like this pattern (by Soph) a lot, but I had some trouble with the dress. My first attempt was much too small which was odd since the dress uses the same yarn as the doll. I redid it with a hook one size bigger but even so it was still not closing in back and too short, so instead of working the bottom in rounds I did everything in straight rows and added some plackets in the back for buttoning, and added 4 rows for extra length. I guess I crochet tighter than most people and that the doll must have been stretched when I stuffed it.

One small change I made was adding a row of decorative chain stitch above the hem. SInce I can't sell her I was thinking of looking for a swap but now I think I may keep her for Puni and me. I like these colors. Now if only I can make her nice hair and features.

Straw straw straw strawberry

So we're back. I didn't do anything special but I'm feeling tired and going to Paris tomorrow evening for a training session on Thursday, so I'd better do some laundry tonight. Thankfully the week will be short.

As I had thought Puni looked very cute in her Indian clothes. Bollywood beware!

On Monday we went to the park with Puni. I left father and daughter together at the swings for a while as I dashed to the shops to buy some chocolates for my parents. Stanislas Square was looking its best - recently redone, stone sparkling white, golden gates shining under a cloudless blue blue sky. When I was small I remember the square being used as a parking lot - sounds like such a pity now, but those were different times. As I grew up the square itself became pedestrians only but cars could still circle it. Some years after I left they turned it completely pedestrian, and in fine weather the cafes extend far into the square.

It made me wish I had my camera, but I hadn't, so here's a photo filched from the town's site.

I worked a bit on Puni's Strawberry Shortcake. I know it doesn't look very different from the last photo I posted, but embroidering the stripes, hiding all the thread ends and sewing the buttons took some time, and it's not by far one of the tasks I enjoy, so I'm glad it's done.

Anzu

I think I'm going to call this one Anzu. I have a porcelain doll called like that already but it's a name I like a lot.

I won't be able to sell this one (pattern not mine) so maybe I'll look for a swap. She's far from finished so there's no hurry.

I wonder if there's a way to avoid the little "color jumps" when doing a decrease on a stripe.

Well, in a few minutes we're going to fetch Puni and we'll be back on Tuesday. It will be good to see her again. I can't wait to try the Indian costume I bought her.

Biscuit's House

I'm feeling much better, thankfully my cold or strep or pharyngitis or whatever it was has been nipped in the bud, but I'm not going to post much this week either as I'm going to Italy the day after tomorrow for a meeting.

So today I thought I would post about Biscuit. People who have known me for a long time, from my Jenny and Licca collecting days know about Biscuit, but maybe others have wondered where the name came from.

Biscuit is the first - and so far only - stuffed bear I ever made. She was made from a kit that was available in the July 97 issue of Oshare Koubou (I had been drawn by her cute expression and the ears peeking out from the straw hat). So I made her almost 10 years ago. I bought my first sewing-machine to make her dress. I had no idea how to tell the front of the machine from its back, how to thread it, how to work it, I was a complete ignoramus. My husband who had had good grades at school in "kateika" (household disciplines?) showed me how to use it and actually it's he who made most of this dress.

I had bought a cheap sewing-machine in a home center because I wasn't sure how long I would stick to sewing doll clothes as a hobby. I was just at that time joining a doll-making class in Tokyo, had found that we would need to make the doll clothes ourselves as well, and had bought a Japanese fashion doll and a pattern book to practice sewing (as I had no previous experience at all). Incidentally, this made me fall headlong into a period of frenzied collecting of Japanese fashion dolls, which lasted for 2 or 3 years.

After a few months I knew that the hobby was here to stay, and the cheap sewing machine was driving me crazy - it was very hard to control the speed with the foot pedal - so one evening I dragged hubby to the shopping mall on the spur of the moment, and bought a Janome which I used until this February.

You can tell I was a novice because Itied the thread used to embroider the paws on the outside instead of taking a couple of small stitches, inserting the needle inside and cutting from the other side of the limb.

I named her Biscuit after a name I saw in a teddy bear book, and I named my website Biscuit's House because of her. The website still exists but I haven't updated it in a couple of years.

Biscuit is a little dusty but still hale and hearty ; and in her backpack today I discovered two very old and mushy Japanese candies - thankfully, wrapped candies.