First of Five

Rosey Anne, the first of five new Prairie Flower girls is finished. With their bodies all nicely stuffed, they are a blank canvas; they have the potential to be anything, just like a young child.

The first doll was inspired by Raggedy Anne, with her cute triangle nose, embroidered heart, and sweet smile. I'm hoping to find a light pink gingham to make her a pretty apron. It is almost as much fun thinking about the next doll as making it :-)

More Prairie Flower Finery

The Bleu Door pattern site ( www.thebleudoor.com ) continues to be a gold mine of patterns to adapt for the Prairie Flowers. Here are a few new patterns, all of which (with the exception of the crochet sweater above) have been adapted from these patterns.

First, there is a simple nightgown from 1920. This is made of a pale pink batiste, with a sprinkling of crochet flowers around the neck, and featherstitching around the bottom. The pattern is here:

Nightgown

The bedjacket is just a simple sweater crocheted from laceweight mohair yarn. I developed the pattern originally for Waldorf dolls, and have adapted it for mini-free spirits, and now the Prairie Flowers:

Bed Jacket

Next is a simple shirt and jumper combination. The shirt has 3/4 length sleeves that are not set in; the neck and sleeve edges finished with either purchased or self bias trim. The pattern is here:

Shirt

The jumper is also super easy, and from the same 1920 pattern as the shirt:

Jumper


These cute and simple overalls are from a 1917 pattern. I made them from an old pair of my husbands blue jeans...the straps here were a little narrow to easily make up, so on the pattern I've widened them a bit. And added a touch of embroidery to the legs. Same simple shirt with these overalls as above. The pattern is here:

Overalls

Close up of the overall embroidery. A Prairie girl should have Prairie flowers blooming across her overalls :-)

Pansies, pinks, and peonies

I strolled around the house yesterday with my camera, and took some pictures of what is blooming. 13 peony bushes, a shrub rose on steroids, and several volunteer pinks from last year, to name a few.

Peonies are wonderful; plant them (not too deep) and they take care of themselves and bloom for years and years.

Pansies always have such cheerful faces, and the yellow ones I got this year are particularly sunny :-)

Flowers always amaze me. Why a device to lure pollinators should be so wondrously beautiful to us seems to me a signature of God.

"...if eyes were made for seeing, then Beauty is its own excuse for being..." Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bleuette fashions for Prairie Flowers

I'm not a very good pattern drafter when it comes to sewing doll clothing, so I asked Janie Hile at www.thebleudoor.com for permission to adapt some of the wonderful original Bleuette patterns for the Prairie Flowers, and she kindly said yes.

The adapted patterns for the apron and jacket above are here:

Apron 

Jacket

The jacket pattern is from 1913, and the apron pattern from 1909.


Here are the two basic A-line dresses:

Both of these patterns are from 1912. I've made them simpler than the original, with little embellishment. But that is the neat thing about a simple pattern, some lace and ric-rac, or contrasting fabric panels can change the look entirely.



Simple A-line Dresses




I also dearly love dainty underwear for dolls, so here are a couple of patterns called 'combinations,' which are just what the name implies - a combination of chemise and pantaloon. The one on the left is a 1918 pattern; the one on the right is from 1916.

Made up in lightweight batiste, with perhaps a touch of embroidery, and they are lovely underwear. In a cotton calico, they could be rompers or overalls.

Combinations

And lastly, some simple underwear; panties that can be worn under the dresses, and a dainty camisole.

Undies

Thank-you, Janie, for providing such a wonderful, and historic, pattern site, and for letting me use the patterns for the Prairie Flower dolls. Some styles are simply timeless, just like the love of dolls :-)

We're back in business

So I'm learning the hard way that not all document readers are created equal :-) Of course, for crochet patterns it is not an issue, but with a sewing pattern it is quite important that what you print out is scaled properly.

To that end, the Prairie Flowers doll pattern is back on the site with these recommendations when printing out the pattern:

First, use Adobe's Acrobat Reader (free) to view and print the patterns. If you do not have this reader, you can get it here (you will need to know the operating system you are using on your computer):

http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/

And next, when you get ready to print the pattern, on the Print page you must set the "Page Scaling" (about the middle of the page) to NONE. This will allow the pattern to be printed out just as I drew it. If this is not the default, change it to NONE, otherwise you will get a small, blank border around the pattern that will change the scaling of the pattern pieces.

I hope this hasn't screwed anyone up. I'm getting ready to test this on both Windows and Mac operating systems (I use Linux, which I doubt many of you are using). I don't expect there to be any problems, but you never know with computers...

Back to the drawing board

This will be a quick post. When I created the PDF file for the Prairie Flowers cloth doll pattern, the pattern became distorted. I only found this out as I was creating the clothing patterns. Not sure if this is occurring when I export the file to PDF, or when I print it out with my document viewer.

At any rate, I've removed the pattern from the site for now in order to get it 'right.' If you have copied it already, I would not use the pattern and wait until I have the corrected pattern up and available. It won't take long...the pattern is fine until it gets turned into a PDF, so if nothing else I will make it available as a Word document.

I'm so sorry if any of you have already started making the doll. The pattern would still make a cute doll, she just wouldn't be quite the right size for her clothes :-(

Prairie Flowers, an original cloth doll

Last spring I designed a cloth doll I called Prairie Flowers. She is a simple cloth doll, 11 1/2 inches tall, made from 100% woven cotton material. Above is Lillian, one of the dolls I made a year ago.

I've come back to these cloth dolls, to make the pattern available, and to see what kind of different looks can be achieved with this cloth doll pattern.

The pattern for the doll is located here:

Prairie Flowers Doll Pattern

A picture tutorial for making the doll is located here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29184580@N04/sets/72157623903215816/

The pattern for the doll is a 'template' that is traced onto freezer paper (available here: http://www.dollmakersjourney.com/supplies.html, near the bottom of the page). Trace the pattern to the non-shiny side of the freezer paper, cut out, and iron the pattern to the fabric. The edge of the template is the sewing line, so make sure to leave plenty of space between pattern pieces for the seam allowance.






After the pattern pieces have been sewn and turned, stuff the pieces with your favorite stuffing material. I've mentioned this before, but the best way to stuff a cloth doll is to lightly dampen the pieces with a mist of water. Work the material in your hands after it is dampened, and stuff the body firmly. Dampening the material will help to eliminate wrinkles when you stuff.






It is also VERY important to pay attention to the stretch of your fabric, and how you lay the pattern pieces on the material. These two bodies were made from the same pattern piece; but one was laid on the fabric with the stretch along the length of the body, and the other with the stretch running from side to side. The pattern pieces are marked how they should be placed. Before ironing them on, stretch your material along the grain and across it to determine which way the maximum stretch runs.

After all the parts are nicely stuffed, it is time to make the face, and perhaps add a touch of embroidery to the neckline of the doll. The tutorial shows a way to make the faces you see here; they are a combination of paint (for the iris and pupil of the eye), embroidery (mouth, nose, eyebrows, and iris), and crayon, to blush the cheeks. It is easier to do this and the embroidery before the limbs are attached to the doll.


Two new Prairie Flowers :-) I called them this because of the flowers embroidered around the neckline.

An Awesome Opportunity

My family and I had the awesome opportunity to hear Kevin Ford, pilot of STS-128, talk about his adventure aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

Their mission launched last August, 2009 to the International Space Station and took 15,000 lbs of supplies, experiments, and equipment, and performed three space walks. They also took Nicole Stott to the ISS as a space station crewmember, and returned Tim Kopra.

Kevin was informative, funny, and gracious. It was terrific.

Thanks to my brother-in-law Roger for the pictures. I'm the wannabe with the braid :-)

Adorable Annies by De Powell

A friend on the 'Friends of Cloth Dolls' message board shared a link to these adorable Annie patterns a few months ago. In addition to crocheting, I also love to make cloth dolls, and De Powells Annies have snagged my heart. I've been working on the pattern 'Goody, Goody, Gumdrop,' which makes two Annies, a 10" and a 12".


Here are the body pieces for the 10" and 12" doll all stuffed and closed up. A great tip for stuffing a doll like this nice and smooth, with no wrinkles, is to spray the cloth with water from a simple spray bottle, before stuffing. Work the misted water into the fiber of the cloth, especially around the neck and head, then stuff. Keep the body slightly damp (not soaked), and stuff hard. You'll be amazed at how much better your stuffed doll body will look. Gail Wilson shared this tip on her website.




Here are the girls with their painted and embroidered faces, and all the limbs assembled :-)







And here we have very simple wigs. De uses a very simple wigging technique. If you want more hair coverage on the back of the head, you can just make a crochet chain a few chains long and hook your hair strands into this. Stitch it down to the back of the head and pull up the ponytails. Either way is very cute.






With bows in our hair, and our pretty matching bloomers. The clothing patterns for these dolls are very simple, but work up very nice.




And here are the completed dolls, all ready to warm the heart of a child, regardless of her age :-)