(You can read more about my adventures making my first Waldorf Doll here.)

Hair.

This was the part that I was really nervous about. I knew that I wanted the doll to have a shaggy haircut, because the little boy who’s going to play with him has shaggy hair too. And I think it’s the most appealing ‘boy’ haircut. Particularly for dolls.

But even the book warned that it was pretty much the hardest hairstyle to pull off. So I went in, expect it to take ages. Luckily I read (somewhere on the ravelry waldorf dolls group forum – though I can’t find the exact post now), that someone was using the knitting pattern stitch from Grrr by ‘Housemate Alice‘ (because sometimes the world is that small. :) which I thought seemed like a genius idea.

So I played around with a bit of a swatch to work out my gauge, measured around the head and got stuck in.

The yarn is Oxford Kitchen Yarn sock yarn in Biscuit (the other half of the ball used to make the Earl Grey Tea and Biscuit sock) which I held double, to get as much hair as I could.

I don’t have an exact pattern – basically the plan is to make a close fitting cap, so I decreased pretty much as I would for a hat, all be it one where I didn’t want the decreases to line up exactly. After a while, with the decreases it becomes a bit of a judgement call as to whether you should knit two loop stitches in a row, or alternate them as usual. But it’s not that hard – I just erred on the side of not wanting any bald spots.

The knitting probably took me a couple of days. The loop stitch looks complicated when you first try it but becomes second nature very quickly so I was able to knit in the garden while FB played without him being any the wiser.

Once the cap was complete I got to do what turned out to be the BEST BIT.

I cut all the loops and suddenly had hair in my hands.

(Cousin IT?)

After that it was just a case of fitting the cap to the head and sewing it down.

One of the things I love about this stitch is that tugging the hair actually tightens the stitch, so it should be able to handle being played with by a toddler. :)

So there you go – I made a boy, with hair!

In conclusion – making shaggy doll hair is really not hard. It also didn’t take very long in the grand scheme of things. And it was fun.

And, personally I’m really happy with the results.

More soon.

(You can read the first post about me dipping my toe into the world of Waldorf Dolls here.)

So last time I posted, the doll looked like this:

a day or so later (after looking at a lot of other dolls, and working out what I liked and disliked) I sat down and sewed the facial features.

I have to say, it was well worth buying a doll making needle. I did a lot of swapping between that and a decent embroidery needle, depending if I was working through the head, or on the top layer of fabric.

I started and ended at the back of the head, which allowed me to pull both ends of the threads and tie them together (this will be hidden by the hair, and won’t be accessible at all), which helped the eyes sink into the head a bit.

I did the same with the mouth but didn’t pull as tight. The threads are just normal 6ply embroidery threads, spilt into 3 threads for the eyes and 4 for the mouth (I think.)

Next up, I cut out all the body and limb pieces and set about making the body.

Once that body had come together I tucked the shoulders into the body and sewed the neck to the top edge of the body.

You could make really labour intensive skittles this way! :)

Getting the stitches neat led to a lot of turning the body upside-down to pick up the sewing stitch on one side and turning it the right way round again to pick up the stitch on the otherside.

However it was worth taking the time, since I ended up with a neat neck edge.

The limbs were fiddlier to sew, but really it’s just a case of taking your time.

Once they were all sewn and stuffed I set about sewing the limbs onto the body. FB is going to be two, so I was working on a jointed doll. Even though I was a bit intimidating, it turned out to be fine.

Again it would have been much harder to do without the doll making needle but it turned out that sewing the eyes and sewing the limbs on was a very similar process.

Basically you send a length of crochet cotton through the arm, and the body and out the other arm, they you repeat the process again but about 1cm lower that the first thread. Then you do the same thing again very close to each of those two threads – so you have two pairs of threads – an upper pair and a lower pair. You knot these four threads together at one side, and then you pull the other four threads tight on the other side, so that the arms pull in tight to the body (this sets them into the body and makes the shoulders), and thenn knot those four threads together.

I then took each end of thread separately and finished them off so that the ends were inside the limb, and both arm joints looked really neat.

I did exactly the same with the legs, although I ended up repositioning the legs because the first time I set them too high and the doll didn’t sit down well. But repositioning was pretty easy – I just carefully snipped one of the knots, trying not to damage the leg fabric as I went.

And I ended up with this:

He’s very huggable and it’s very hard to put him back into the drawer when I’m done sewing for the day.

Next time I’ll show you the hair I made.

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl , we’ll drink to thee.

Yesterday was a busy day -

The Three Wise Men finally made it to the Nativity, after their long journey across the living room.

There was LOTS of snow -

about 4″ in 3 hours on Tuesday night, and we woke up yesterday morning to two(!) igloos made by some of the students who live in the close. Some of them had been working on the large one (big enough to stand up inside) till 4am! Amazing work, and didn’t even make a dent of the amount of snow that had fallen.

FB got his first opportunity to experience snow, since he was about 4 months old when it snowed here last year. He had lots of fun, but it was hard work since the snow was consistantly past his knees.

When it got dark we went to Wasail our allotments. We’re very hopeful that the growing year is going to go really well. (It already is – onions are sprouting, and hopefully – underneath all that snow – the broadbeans are still 3″ high and strong.)

On the right hand side of this picture you can see our tiny orchard which was sang to, and where we scattered left over pitta bread from lunch. :)

I have high hopes that this will be a new family tradition, and love that we will be talking about the snowy first year for years to come.

There was a bit of struggling in the snow…

And then we went home to eat stew and the final pieces of our giant mince pie.

(W was there too! But he took all the photos. :)

(The gentle start to a seasonal corner.)

Over the weekend FB had a fever. He’s fine – he doesn’t get ill much (thank goodness) but when he does he turns into a little busy oven. His sleep goes all over the place, and he wants to be everwhere at once.

Add in british summertime ending (so we’re having to coax those were-5am, now-4am get ups back to at least 5am again), and a couple of work deadlines for me, and you have a mama who needs to take extra care of herself.

So here are a few things I’m enjoying right now:

• Dara O’Briain’s Tickling the English which I’ve borrowed from the library and which is proving to be great fun. For the last two nights I’ve gone to bed as soon as all the jobs for the day were done so that I could read this and think of nothing else for a little bit before sleep. I’m really looking forward to the audio version, which I think its going to be great for car journeys.

• Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers (which is still online) and Tender volume 1 (which is going to help make sure all of our allotment produce gets to the table). I’m very excited about volume 2, which is all about fruit and is out next May.

• Organizing Your Way to a Simple Christmas by Organizing Your Way. Not that I’ve done much towards christmas in the past couple of months but it’s got me thinking, and I know that the printouts are going to prove useful.

• The Natural Parenting Center Blog, which is giving me a huge amount of comfort, and In the Fishbowl, which is giving me lots of thinks to think about (even if things have ended up being more hectic around here than I might have liked, which has meant I’ve been very quiet on the fishes comment boards.)

• Making Waldorf Dolls, which I treated myself to last month. Given that I started crafting when I was about 6 or 7 making toys for myself, it’s been a long time since I made much of anything like that. I’m using the tiny start of a seasonal corner on our sideboard as a way of learning the ropes.

Hope you’re having a good week too. What are you enjoying?