Making a Father Christmas Doll - Part 9

Before padding added.

In the last blog post I showed how the doll was mounted onto the stand.  Things will progress fairly quickly from here.  The doll still needs the outer robe.  Once again, quick is a relative term.  It did not seem like it should take a long time to do this part, but it was time consuming because it is all fitting and hand sewing.

Padding added.

In this case, the clothing is made using the drape method.  The drape method is when shaped pieces of fabric are laid on the doll and hand sewn on to make the clothing.  This is actually much easier than trying to construct a garment and then get the doll into it.  Dolls do not have the flexibility that humans have so it is not easy to put a garment onto a doll.  Trying to taylor a garment in the way human clothes are made is difficult due to their small size.

Before the robe is sewn on, there is another task that must be performed.  The arms were sewn onto the
back of the doll as shown in my previous blog post.  This leaves a lump on the back where the arm armature was sewn to the body.  The lump must be addressed, or the doll will look like it has a hunch back.  That is not exactly the look you want in a Father Christmas doll. 

After padding.

The solution to the lump on the back is to pad the doll so that the lump is no longer higher than the rest of the
back.  In the original instructions for the doll, the suggestion was to wrap the doll in wool roving around the chest and back.  This not only pads the area below the hump, but also gives the doll some girth around the middle.  The body of the doll is basically a graduated cylinder; wider at the base than at the shoulders.  The extra padding gives the doll a more realistic shape.  After all, Santa was supposed to be heavy.  Although being fat is considered repugnant these days, in earlier times in many cultures being fat was a sign of prosperity.  You can see how that would play into the Santa myths. 

I chose not to use wool roving for the padding.  Twenty years ago, when the book Making Old-Fashioned Santas was written (by Candie Frankel and Beverly Karcher) wool roving was less expensive than it is now.  I'd say that the price has more than doubled in the intervening years.  I had plenty of cotton batting and polyester fiberfill so I used that instead.  I folded a strip of batting in half and stuffed it with fiberfill, then sewed the batting to the body.  I kept adding strips and fiberfill until the body was padded.  It is not as lovely as the wool roving, but no one will see it because it will be hidden under the robe.  This is a look at doll rather than a play with it doll.  In this case one should probably not look too closely.  If anyone every takes this doll apart she will wonder what in the world I was thinking when I did that.   However, the solution works, and I was able to reproduce the look without adding additional expense to the doll.

After adding the batting and fiberfill to the figure it was time for the robe.  The body section of the robe is just a rectangle with two slits cut into it for the armholes.  The slits are two and a half inches long.  I cut my rectangle larger than recommended because I was using a fabric that could ravel if it had raw edges.  I had to allow extra fabric to account for the fabric being turned under and hemmed.  All in all, it was still a little long after the fabric was hemmed.  I think I could have easily gone with the size of the fabric rectangle dimensions given in the instructions: thirteen inches by fourteen inches with slits cut four and one-eighth inches from each edge along one fourteen inch edge.  Anyway the fabric around the slits is folded under to make an opening for the arms.  The fabric is slipped under the arms and sewn onto the doll at the armholes and across the top of the front and back and whip stitched along the front opening.  Trim will be added after this to the front, neck opening, and bottom hem.  I chose to leave the bottom of the robe open rather than sew it closed all the way down. 

Now that the doll was padded, the arms looked too thin.  I took out the gathers at the bottom of each arm and lightly stuffed it with the fiberfill before sewing the sleeves to the arms again.  It looks more proportional now.  The head looks a little small, but it will look much larger once the hair, beard, and hat are added.