Cute crafts and exciting craft book news

Friends of mine have an adorable daughter who turned one on the weekend, so a present was in order! Her favourite hairstyle is what my mother used to refer to as Whalespouts, and since she's so horribly cute, I figured I'd continue my grandmother's tradition and make her a portrait doll.




I loved the upside down bows and the heart. And her parents recognised it instantly as a portrait doll, which is always heart warming!

In other, exciting news, Garth Johnson (of Extreme Craft) long awaited book 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse is almost here! Featuring a bunch of artists and their crafts from totally reused materials. I'm in it, somewhere, so grab a copy when it's released, or preorder it from Amazon... EEE!!!!

Tutorial - Design It Yourself Doll Gift for children

When we were little and it was our birthday, our mum would draw up a Breakfast In Bed menu, with everything she could possibly think of, and bring it into our bedroom with a pen. You'd mark off what you wanted for breakfast, and she'd disappear into the kitchen for a bit. Then your chosen breakfast would be presented to you on a tray, with a flower in a vase. It was awesome and we loved it.

This was such a good idea that I stole it for a present for my niece. So I present to you a simple gift idea for kids - DIY (Design It Yourself) Doll gift. I wanted to make a portrait doll of her, but you can make a normal doll instead if you prefer.


You'll need:
Paper, textas and a pen
Blank doll
material, yarn, ribbon ect

Step one: Grab a piece of paper and write out the menu for the doll. You can see mine at the right. But if you can't read it, the options went like this (remember this was for a portrait doll. You can change the options to suit whatever kind of doll you want to make):

(1) My hair colour is:
Blonde
Light brown
brown
Dark brown
Red
Black

(2) My hair length is:
Long
Medium
Short

(3) My eye colour is:
Blue
Green
Light Brown
Dark brown

(4) I would like my doll dressed in:
pants
tshirt
skirt
shorts
dress
tights
hoodie
cardiagan

(5) My dolls shoes should be:
Boots
Runners
Sandals
Other ___________________

(6) Anything else you would like your doll wearing? _____________________________________________________________

(7) My favourite colour is: _______________________________

(8) Another colour I like is: ______________________

(9) Draw what expression you would like your doll to have (here, draw a circle as the face for the child to fill in)

You can decorate the menu any way you like.

Step two: Give the menu to the child and help them fill it in.

Step three: create a doll based on the answers given. There are any number of free doll patterns on the net for you to find, so I wont give another one here.

Step four: Give the DIY doll to the child. Done!

Below is the doll I made for my niece. She likes pink and green as colours, and specified that she would also like her doll wearing ribbons.

Tutorial - Awesomely Luxurious Doll Hair

How do you make good dolls hair? It's something that I've been experimenting with for a while, trying different things and the other day I re-discovered an awesome way to do it. Weirdly enough it was something I first used in about year 7 to make a judges wig from carpet strands. But now, with a little more thought, it works beautifully for dolls hair.

To your left is a doll I made for my niece for Christmas. She's a big fan of pink, so that was the theme of the doll. She's a smaller version of the portrait dolls I've been sewing recently, and she came out really well I thought. Plus, my neice loved her. There's nothing better than a personal present that goes down really well. Makes the heart sing.

So without further ado, here is a tutorial for Awesomely Luxurious Doll Hair!


You'll need:
Yarn in various colours*
sewing needle
thread
scissors

*I've found that the hair looks better if you use more than one colour, or shade of the chosen colour. For this doll I wanted pink hair, so I used all my shades of pink - 2 pale pinks, a bright pink, a dark pink and a fluffy light pink yarn too. It makes a more interesting visual than a single plain colour.

Step one: Measure one strand of yarn across the bottom of the dolls head near the neck (we'll call this the WIG STRAND). You want the WIG STRAND to be long enough to trail down both sides of the head longer than you picture the finished hair. Tie a knot in the WIG STRAND at either side of the head so you'll know where to tie the hair on.

Step two: Cut a number of HAIR STRANDS of yarn of different colours double the length you want the doll's hair to be, and start tying them in between the two knots on the WIG STRAND. A single knot is sufficiant as you'll be stitching them tightly in a minute.

Step three: once there's a good number of yarn HAIR STRANDS tied to the WIG STRAND (see above photo), stretch the WIG STRAND back across the dolls head. Stitch the WIG STRAND to the doll's head, making sure that you stitch through each knot to ensure they don't unravel in the future.
Step four: Continue making and stitching WIG STRANDS until the dolls head is as covered as you want it to be.

Step five: When you come to stitching the final WIG STRAND on the head, place it with the strands falling over the face rather than falling across the previous hair and stitch it on.
Then smooth the hair away from the face. This ensures that the knots and the WIG STRAND cannot be seen from the front of the doll.

Step six: give your doll a hair cut, cutting the strands to the length you want. To ensure you don't end up with a weird looking straight line, gather the hair into a horizontal line and cut across the ends. Then when you let it go, the hair will fall and look better than a straight line

And that's it. Your doll's coiffure is done! Long, thick luxurious hair that any doll would be proud of.


You can put this hair up in a pony tail, but it is quite thick (it can look a little like a ponytail of dreadlocks) so if you want your doll to have her hair up, you could try making the WIG STRANDS spiral around the head instead of straight across it, and leave the middle of the head bald. You wont be able to see it when the hair is up, and that will eliminate some of the bulk

Go forth and hair my children!

Craft mirrors

My grandmother was very artistic. She could take any image at all and copy it perfectly. She used to lament because she couldn't draw out of her imagination, but truly could copy anything perfectly. It was a staggering talent and one I always admired and secretly wished I had.

But it suddenly occurred to me a few months ago that I have her talent, just in 3d form. I can take a photo of anything and copy it in knitting. I've made Ludo from Labyrinth, GIR from Invader Zim, most of the creatures from Where The Wild Thing Are, Daleks and K9 from Dr Who, even an SLR and an anotomicall correct heart. It's like a puzzle, to figure out how to knit them, but I love it.

My amazing and terribly talented friend, SaraMae Page, sent 6 of these (right) dolls to me as part of Totem. They're beautiful little peg dolls and are collectively called Domestic Gist.

Truth be told, I wanted to keep them all. But instead they starred in Totem and then were sent back home to Mrs Page.

I wanted to make her something special as a present, and I couldn't think of anything better than knitting her a version of her Domestic Gist peg dolls.

The 'type' effect on the dress was created by using a normal yarn in a sepia/gold colour for the paper and a thin black crochet cotton together. She leans a little because of her dress, but I don't mind that.

One of the things I love about a stash is that I can rummage around in the 6 clear plastic boxes of yarn (organised by colour) and knit this entire doll from it. Even the pearls came from a stash - I find a lot of broken jewelery on the ground which I collect up and take home.

The stuff I find mostly falls into three categories:
broken jewelery
buttons
and playing cards.

It's a strange but ever growing collection of Found Objects which all reside in glass jars on my shelf. I dive into it about once a week to deck out dolls or add them to artworks.

Speaking of dolls and Totem, I made another portrait doll to give to my exceptionally hard working and devoted producer, Simone Collins. Simone was really pleased when I gave it to her. The doll is wearing a shirt based on one of my favourites of Simone's shirts she used to wear when I was working with her. One of the things I love best about the doll is it has Simone's earrings. Simone wears flesh tunnels through her ears, but the prettiest ones I've ever seen, they're black with sparkly diamonds around the circle. Portrait dolls are all about showcasing a few particular visual traits of the person you're portraying, so I knew that Simone's earrings would be really important to this doll. Luckily I found little circular black beads with diamantes around their edges in my local bead shop. Not perfect, but close enough to suggest Simone's jewelery. She even commented that the doll had her earrings! So that was nice.

I love when presents are so perfect for the recipients. Makes me so warm inside!

Some days you just want to have someone send you something in the mail

Today I found Tinniegirl, a woman from Melbourne who sells ace old tins packed full of crafting treasures through her store on etsy. I love this idea! Imagine getting a package with a beautiful old tin, and inside some fat quarters, some buttons and other lovely things. That'd so make any crafty person's day! I have to confess, having a look around her shop was too much temptation and I bought one. I can't wait til it arrives!

This come straight from Tinniegirl's blog, it's the contents of one her of tins. How heartwarming is that? Sharing craft, straight from the heart...

In other news, and speaking of spending, I went on a gallery crawl with a dear old friend of mine and accedently bought an artwork. I love buying artworks, although the last time I did it was a couple of years ago, I love being able to support local artists and having someone unique on my walls. They're 2 white feathers lino-print with blue designs so they look like an old faded blue-and-white china bowl. They're beautiful, but I've forgotten the artist's name just for the moment. I'll post more about it when I go to pick it up next week.

But last for today, my assistant for Totem was a friend of mine who is a lovely woman and remarkably talented. I wanted to thank her for all her hard work and a bottle of wine just didnt seem right. So instead I knitted a portrait doll of her. She's just recieved it in the mail so that's why I can share it now... I loved it, it really captured her essence. Stay tuned for more portrait dolls over the coming weeks!