Making a Father Christmas Doll - Part 5

Note stitching to delineate the thumb.

I had been blogging about a doll I am making, a Father Christmas doll.  Last blog post I digressed for a minute to show some photos from my latest road trip.  Now I am back home and working on the doll again. Regular readers may recall that I am making a pattern doll.  I am following a pattern from a book called Making Old Fashioned Santas bu Candie Frankel and Beverly Karcher.  The advantage of working with a pattern is that a lot of the work has been done for you in figuring out how to size the parts so that they are in proportion to each other.  This allows you more time to work for making the doll your own by choosing different fabrics and accessories. Since I started this project so close to the holidays, I needed the advantage of that extra time in order to have the doll completed before the holiday decorations come out.

Both thumbs need to be pointed up.

Arms inserted into sleeve tube.

When I last blogged about the doll I had made the arms and needed to attach the hands to the arms.  That was when I ran into a problem in that the wrists were too small to fit over the arms.  I had to rework the pattern to accommodate the extra width needed in the wrist area. I have reworked the pattern with mixed results. I did not change the size of the pattern for the hands.  I only changed the size of the wrist area so that it would fit over the fabric on the arm.  At the moment, the hands look over-sized compared to the body.  They will not look quite so large once the trim is added to the garment.  That will hide the wrists as far as up as the thumb.  However, I still think the hands will look a little large.  If I should use this pattern again I think I would make the mittens a bit smaller and not stuff them so firmly.  If they still look too large once the
doll is completed I will open the tip of the mittens, remove some of the polyester fiberfill and then re-sew the mitten by hand.  All is not lost if things don't
actually turn out exactly proportionately correct.  A characteristic of folk art dolls is that they are not always in correct proportions.

The edge of the wrist of the mitten was folded under, slipped onto the arm, and hand sewn into place.  Do the same for the other mitten.  Make sure that the thumbs are pointing up on both sides.  I found that the process was made easier by pinning one side of the wrist to keep it from slipping around while I was sewing on the other side.  This process took about twenty minutes or so.

At this point I am sure that you are wondering how this bell shaped body and cylinder with mittens is going to work out.  The wires inside the wrapped cloth will bend and hold its shape to become the shoulders and arms of the doll.  Before we get that far, there are two more steps that must be completed, and that requires some explanation.

Dolls can be made so that the clothing is an exact replica of how garment sewing is normally done.  Due to the small size of the pieces, it is somewhat difficult to make doll clothing.  It is even more difficult to get the clothing onto the doll as the doll generally does not have the flexibility and range of motion
of a human body.  Many times, doll clothes are made by the draping method, in which shaped pieces of cloth are draped over the figure and hand-sewn into place.  This doll will use the draping method and since we have been working on the hands and arms, this is where we will begin.

I cut a five and a half by sixteen inch of the fabric I plan to use for the robe of the doll.  If I were using a fabric such as wool felt that will not ravel, I could have reduced the sixteen inch measurement to fifteen, but because I will need to fold over then edge as if I were making a hem on a garment in order to have a solid sewing edge I added some extra length to account for the folded edge.   The short edges were folded over and hemmed by machine.  Then the piece of cloth was folded in half lengthwise and sew down the long edge to form a tube.  Then the cloth was turned right side out.  The arm cylinder was inserted into the tube.

That is about where I will end today.  There is one more step that needs to be done before the arms are attached to the body.  This coming Thursday will be Thanksgiving Day, and I will be spending time with family and friends so there will not be a blog post on that day.  Check back on Sunday, November 29th for more on making a Father Christmas doll.