Recently a Sew-Op colleague asked me to stitch faces on a pair of small soft dolls. Each doll will live in a cigar box with pre-cut fabric, thread, pins and needles in a pincushion, and other necessities for a young girl to sew her clothing. The girls are twins so the dolls are too. Let’s have a before and after shot.
I apologize for the photo quality; I was trying to get them returned the same morning I finished them.
The book they are on top of is The Fine Art of Making Faces on Cloth Dolls, by Colette Wolff. It was very helpful for feature placement, though it didn’t have much in the way of stitching mechanics.
I’m so-so on how these came out. Happy enough with them to not try to pull the stitches out and start over (although the fabric would not be so happy to accommodate that – I slightly snagged the first doll and gave her a permanent dimple; fortunately it was in a good spot), not happy enough that I feel like doing more. Here’s a close-up of each, first doll I stitched on the left.
My advice to anyone doing a similar project amounts to: stitch the face before adding hair. It gives you the opportunity to hide thread ends at the back of the head, and makes it more clear where the features should go for a realistically proportioned face. That’s basically it. Otherwise I winged it based on drawings on the front of the Wolff book!