Waldorf Dolls

For awhile now I've been meaning to make waldorf dolls for the girls using this pattern. I finally just sat down and did it. L had told me she wanted a "wiggly baby" (the fisher price doll that's been her favorite for the last year and a half has a bean bag body) so I figured using millet for the body would weight it and make it more "wiggly". So, I made L's first. I increased the pattern size by 141% (one of the standard increase percentages on my copier and I was too lazy to figure out how to do custom percents). My only complaint about the pattern is that it makes the head too long & skinny (when dh saw the doll he asked if I'd been trying to make a "banana baby"). I left it without a face or hair and left it where she'd find it when she woke up in the morning. She liked it, but decided it needed a face and hair, so we went shopping for "hair". I was planning to use fabric markers and draw on the faces, but when we were shopping A said she wanted her baby to have green eyes and fabric marker green is too "real green" for eyes, so I figured I'd just use embroidery floss for both of them. As far as hair, L was insistent on pink hair. When I pointed out that babies don't have pink hair, she said "Mom, she's a doll, she can have whatever color hair I want her to have!" alrighty then, pink hair it is! A chose a nice dark brown for her baby's hair but I forgot to get the matching thread that day so initially made her baby a handkerchief bonnet (since the embroidery floss face means there are knots and such on the back of her head) and she hasn't been willing to "give her baby up" for me to add the hair yet. I also tried to make the head more round on A's baby, though it's still not as round as I would have liked.

They certainly aren't perfectly made, I was just figuring out my sewing machine, the faces are abit crooked, I'm still not sure how you're supposed to sew the hair on. . . but the girls seem happy with them and that's what counts.

Oh, the millet body, I stuffed the arms and legs with wool roving, then I made a muslin "bag" roughly the size of the doll's torso and filled that bag with millet (after putting it inside the doll body) and stitched it closed, then stuffed wool around it in the body. Seemed to work pretty well. I was afraid the millet might leak out if it was just loose in the body, plus I wasn't sure it would work right to have millet in the arms and legs (the millet filled doll I've seen online is just a "bag body" she doesn't have legs, you can't change her clothes, etc) so I came up with this approach.