MORE LITTLE DOLLS

These dolls are all the same size as the ones from last week (10 inch). I enjoyed making these smaller dolls. They were a little cheaper to make too. The top one I still have. The little figurine in the picture with her was a gift from my daughter. The next two I made for nieces. The little black doll fell and broke her head during an earthquake. So, I made her a new head. She is one of the favorite ones I made.

SMALLER DOLLS

Most of the dolls I have shown have been larger than these. These dolls are all 10 inches tall. The one on the right in the first picture is a Googlie doll. This was a very popular doll. I think everyone in the doll class made at least one of them. I made two. (Why stop at one?)

This doll and the other two in the middle have jointed arms and legs (jointed at the elbows and knees) which made them a little more tedious to put together.

This is the other Googlie doll.  I made it for my daughter while she was working for the Red Cross to put in her office. She said she got a lot of comments (and compliments) on it. Just to brag a little, she (my daughter, not the doll) got the highest award Red Cross gives while she was working there. It was presented to her by Elizabeth Dole who was head of the Red Cross at the time.

 Thank you for visiting my dollies. I plan to be back next Friday to share some more.

Hugs,

Charlotte 

Dolls To Share

This picture was taken about 17 or 18 years ago. Our Women's Ministry at church had a special day each year and that year I was asked to share my dolls and how I made them. Not all the dolls are in the picture. There are two other pictures that show some of the others, but I decided this one picture was enough to share. You can get the idea.

This is a Sugar Britches doll. This was a very popular mold 20 years ago. After I moved to Arizona, I saw Indian dolls that were made from this mold in stores here. 

The following two pictures are for Anni. She fell in love with Oliver, so thought I would post a couple more pictures of the little guy.

Hugs, Charlotte

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Another Doll I Made

This is another doll that I can't remember what I named her.  Most of the dolls I made had porcelain bodies, but this one has a cloth body - only her head, arms and feet are porcelain. 

Here she is with Gloria, the first doll I made. You may recognize her from a former post, the Beginning of My Doll Making. She had a blue dress on in that picture. This is also the same doll as in the header picture with still another dress on and a different wig. Another doll in the header picture is wearing this dress. Obviously these dresses were made with the same basic pattern. In this picture, you can see the contrast in body types and sizes.

Thank you for visiting my dollies. They always enjoy visitors.

Hugs, Charlotte

Oh - one more thing. If you have not visited our new blog SPIRITUAL SUNDAYS, I hope you will hop over there and check it out if you are interested in inspirational/spiritual posts. This is something Ginger of Enchanting Cottage and I have just started. This is a place we can go each weekend to share with our blogging friends. Mr. Linky will be back up along with a new post by Saturday noon Pacific Time. We did a giveaway to the first person that signed on last week which was our first time. That person was Ruthie. After she received her gift, she e-mailed me a picture of her holding it. I just posted it on the Spiritual Sundays blog.

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April, June & Oliver

Today I would like to introduce you to April, June and Oliver. I had a lot of fun making these particular dolls. I made April first, then June and then Oliver. 

This is April

June

Oliver and June 

I named this little guy Oliver because he made me think of Oliver Twist. I remembered a movie called "Oliver" from several years earlier that I really liked.

April wearing June's clothes. Notice the oversize hat and shoes. She's playing "dress up."

April modeling a dress and hat I made for my doll making teacher. Yes, I made the hat too. Making dolls got to be pretty expensive, so I started making clothes for some of the other students who didn't sew, and also for the teacher who sold dolls but didn't have time to make clothes for them. This is the way I ended up financing my "habit." And doll making really did get to be addictive - much like blogging has become for me now. Making dolls was a lot more expensive though. Well, maybe not when you consider that I spend so much time on the computer now that we decided to get a second one. We really didn't need two until I started blogging. 

I usually do Show & Tell from my regular blog At Home in Scottsdale. But today I decided to share something on this new blog that I just started just for my dolls.

I hope you will visit the other new blog that Ginger and I are starting called Spiritual Sundays. This is a blog designed to let our blogging friends share their inspirational posts. You can click on it to go there and find out more about it. Mr. Linky will be up on that blog Saturday at noon MST for those who would like to sign on. It's called Spiritual Sundays, but we are putting it up on Saturday because so many are busy on Sunday mornings with church activities. This way they can go ahead and post and sign up on Saturdays. This is somewhat of an experiment for us as we have never done anything like it before. We are hoping that a lot of people will want to join in. 

Hugs, Charlotte

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Beginning of My Doll Making

When our son moved out of our home after graduating from college, I decided to turn his room into a sewing room. So - out went the waterbed. Up went the wallpaper (another thing I learned to do while living in Stockton, California.) I had loved to sew since I was about 10 years old when I learned to sew on a treddle sewing machine, making doll clothes incidentally. The theme I had chosen for my sewing room was "Love Makes the World Go Round".

When one of the ladies at our church announced that she was going to start a class on making porcelain dolls, I was excited. I told her I wanted to make a clown doll for my sewing room. She said she recommended making two dolls at once because you could be painting one of them while the other was being fired. So, reluctantly I started making two dolls. Here are those two dolls.

Picture above is the greenware for one of the dolls I made. This is how each doll started out. Carol, our teacher, had the molds and she made the greenware for the students. We smoothed the seams and rough edges and she took them home and fired them. Then she brought them back to class and we painted them in stages with firings in between.

After this comes the fun part - putting the doll together, setting the eyes, putting on the wig, making clothes for it. Making the clothes was fun, but I also enjoyed making shoes for them. I searched around in my doll room closet and came up with a shoebox size plastic box that I had stored extra doll shoes in. I bought patterns for the shoes and bought remnants of leather from a store that sold leather. The remnants were not very expensive. Making shoes was not hard, but it was a little tedious, especially the smaller ones.

Here is a picture of some of the patterns. 

One of my favorite things to do back in those doll-making days was going to doll shows. They had some fantastic ones in California, often at fair grounds where they would have a huge barn like building filled with dolls and doll making stuff. That's where I bought most of the eyes and wigs as well as antique lace, tiny buttons, and all kinds of good things. 

I've enjoyed sharing my doll making experiences with you. Actually I created this blog just to experiment with different things rather than doing it on my regular blog and risk messing it up. After I created this one, I liked it so well I wanted to share it. I made over 30 dolls back in the 1980s. As I have time I'll tell about them. For now, this is it. I can't spend all of my time blogging although my Hubby probably thinks I do.

Hugs,

Charlotte

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