FREE PATTERN

BUTTERNUT MATERIALS NEEDED Your choice of body fabrics Wire for Armature Colour pencils Your choice of embellishments. Plenty of creative imagination. INSTRUCTIONS Butternut is a template pattern. 1. Trace head, legs, arms on doubled fabric and sew. 2. Trace four for the body. 3. Sew first 2 pieces of the body where it is marked centre front/back together 4. Do the same with the next 2 pieces as well 5. You have now 2 parts for the body. Join the body keeping the rightsides together. Sew the darts in before turning it. 6. Turn all the body parts inside out and keep aside This doll will need an armature. A coat hanger wire will do. You can have 2 wires but remember to twist them together at the tip . This end will will go inside the body or you can bend the wire into a V shape, the v end will go into the body. The wire should be long enough to go right up the base of the neck in the body and into the stand at the bottom. Stuff the toes first. Now insert the wire into legs right through the fabric . As shown in the picture. Start stuffing the legs making sure that the wire is in the centre. Stuff only up to the mark indicated. Keep it aside. Next stuff the arms and the body. The body should not be stuffed too hard as you will need to insert the wire. Insert the wire into the body from the bottom , so that the wire goes up till the base of the neck. Now pull the legs up and sew it to the body just at the point where the stuffing stops for the legs. Do not put the stuffed part of the leg into the body as you will find it hard to close the body. You will have to adjust the legs a bit to get them both at the right height and hand sew them onto the body . Once this is done you can stuff the body a bit more to close the gaps and then close the opening. Stuff the head and close it with a running stitch at the top. You may need to add stuffing while you are pulling the head closed to get the wrinkles out. The face is ready to be painted. Sew all the parts together and she is ready for you to embellish to your hearts content. ENJOY. If you make a doll please do not forget to send me some pictures. I will be delighted to put them up in my website.

Butternut

This is Butternut. She was inspired by butternut gourd. Don't laugh now, I get my inspiration from almost anything so to get inspired by a simple little gourd is nothing to be surprised of LOL!.

She sort of ran away from me. I had different ideas at first. I started off by thinking she would be a he but well you know what these dolls are like they have mind of their own. I am not prejudiced or a womens lib person but that is what the doll wanted to be a she. This one is definitly not too long anything LOL! She knocked in my head so loud that she had to be let out soon so last weekend that is what I did. Drafted and stitched her up. Now I can share her with you.
She is FREE PATTERN for you to use.
Enjoy her.

Thanks for the helpful comments

Thank you to everyone who gave me some very useful comments regarding the doll. It helps a lot when your are undecided and not sure if you are being too critical of your work so when I get comments that are similar to my thoughts it clears my doubts. Zoanna, I too am long nothing as you put it LOL! Perhaps that is why I seem to make everything long in my dolls.
Will be posting a new doll that is in progress soon and have a surprise for you all too. YOu will have to wait patiently as I wanted to finish it over the weekend but just couldn't. I will do it this weekend though

Patti's class

I am taking Patti Culea's on line class from Doll Street "Radical Colourations" Usually I would have preferred to have taken this class when Patti comes here but unfortunately her classes always coincide with the week when my term starts and I can never take time off then. So I decided to take her on line class. I made this doll from the Pattern Drafting class which I took last year. I hadn't made the pattern up so I thought I could test the pattern as well as use it for the Dyeing and colouring class. Even if it doesn't turn out well I won't feel too bad about it.
What do you think about the doll? I feel that her arms need to be shortened a bit and her legs perhaps need to be lengthened. I am quite happy about the body and the head. Its the arms and legs that are worrying me. Your input would be much appreciated. I need to join the legs to the body differently so that the hip line is smooth which I will do when I make a proper doll. But for now she has to sit and I was in a rush so I joined it this way.

Transfer dying

This is how we painted the dye on an A4 Sheet


Doesn't look all that great on paper but look at the results on fabric once it is ironed on below.


Today we had our doll club meeting. Jan gave us a workshop on transfer dying. It was fun as it suited me to the tee because one doesn't have to do too much to get some spectacular results. We painted the dyes onto a piece of A4 sheet. We didn't even have to do any design just put several colours of the dye on the paper. Let it dry. Then we laid our fabric on an ironing board put the A4 sheet with the dried dye on it face down. Covered it with baking paper and ironed it over with a hot iron and voila we got some great results. You can get several other effects simply by cutting various shapes of the paper or putting a plain paper cut into different shapes inbetween the fabric and the dyed paper or even putting feathers etc inbetween to give various effect cool eh

Festival of Colours

These pictures caught my eye today while I was browsing through BBC's website. The pictures are just so beautiful they seem to have captured the mood of celebration so well. There were more but I have not uploaded all. If you are interested in looking
check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/

Coco is ready

She is at last ready. I think I will put some rhine stones on her but otherwise she is done. I couldn't decide on a name for her so had to ask and Judi came up with Coco as a nod to the coconut shell skirt she is wearing.
All the decorations were done with apoxy sculpt. I even made the wreath on her head with apoxy sculpt it is not very clearly visible here but you get the idea.

Getting there

I worked on my doll this week. The going was slow but enjoyed it. She is almost done. I need to add a little bit of glitter and stones perhaps and her slippers done. Just wondering whether I should add some beads to her skirt. I am a beady sort of person LOL! but perhaps not. My nieces say no. Ok I will have to leave her just as it is. Haven't got a name for her yet any ideas?

Working on the Doll

I was working on my doll till late last night. Decorated her skirt with apoxy sculpt. I enjoyed doing that and I received some new stuff to try out today which Patti Culea mentioned in DollStreet. She mentioned Powertex which is available in Australia but, the stuff similar to that we get in Europe is call Paverpol. I have been reading and looking at the instructions and pictures. There are tremendous exciting possibilities with this stuff. It is a fabric hardener. I am hoping to play with it tonight when I get back home. I will incorporate it into the doll.  I have no pictures to show at the moment but will do once I finish my experimenting Here is the link if you want to get an idea of the product http://www.paverpol.com/pages/en_about_us.html