Finished up a new doll yesterday and decided to take her outside for a photo shoot. We had a tiny bit of snow left in our yard and I thought it would make a great backdrop. I think the pictures turned out great, but I froze my poor little fingers and toes in the process!!
Usually when I make a doll I don’t have much of a plan. I just start creating and as I go the doll sort of tells me what it’s going to look like. With this particular doll though, I had decided ahead of time that I would try and make her something warm to wear. I love this time of year, when the leaves change color and fall off, when the air turns colder and especially when it snows – although we don’t get much of it here in Seattle. I also love this time of year because I get to start wearing warmer clothing – hats, boots, coats, scarves – and I thought it would be fun if my dolls could too.
So it was time to create another custom pattern for my dolls. I think I’m really starting to get the hang of pattern making. Now that I’ve done a few it’s not as daunting as it once was. I’ve always been a fan of cloaks, so I searched around the web for hooded cloak patterns. There were several free patterns and tutorials, though all were for adults. It did give me an idea of the basic shapes, however, and I used them to created my own. I love the way an oversized hood looks so I knew I wanted that to be big, plus my dolls kind of have huge heads. I took some measurements of my doll, to get an idea of how long the cloak should be, how large the hood needed to be, etc. And then I drew out the basic shapes onto tracing paper. I used scrap fabric to begin with since I knew the first try likely wouldn’t turn out perfectly. After each attempt I made slight modifications where needed and tried again (pattern making takes a lot of patience!!). I ended up creating three cloaks before I finally got it right, but eventually I was happy with the result. I love it so much I think I need to make more. What do you think?