Santa is almost coming to town........

So I'm moving my doll making over here to this blog. 

Reposted from November 23, 2022. Yes you read right 2022.  I thought I'd start at the beginning. 

My husband has been asking me to make a Santa Claus for a couple of years but not the Coca Cola version. I bought a pattern called Old World Santa by Deanna Hogan of Blue Heron Dolls that seemed to fit the request. I checked and I bought it in 2007. 

To say that I'm really enthusiastic about making a Santa doll would be a lie. I wasn't when he first suggested it and I'm still not. I started it last year in November 2022 and now it's December 2023 and I have gone back to finish it. 

If you go to the link you'll see that there are two versions. I'm making the Santa wearing pants rather than the long robe. 

It's made with craft velour or doe suede which I normally don't use. My favourite fabric is Kona cotton. 

You see those zig zag lines on all the body pieces? The directions on this pattern are......."Follow the grain and stretch lines indicated on the pattern pieces.....the zig zag line indicates the cross grain (with the most stretch, perpendicular to the selvedge." That really confused me so I had to Google to make sure I understood what cross grain meant. 

So the pattern pieces are cut perpendicular to the selvedge? 

Most doll heads made in cotton are cut on the bias and not the cross grain and the body parts on the straight grain which runs parallel to the selvedge.  

As you can see in the pic above I pasted the pattern pieces to cardboard as it's much easier to trace when the pattern uses the freezer paper method. I have a really old Singer sewing machine that I use as I have a "custom" machine foot for doll making. It was a plastic foot that I never used and I took out the middle bit with cutters. Makes it easier to see the seams on the freezer paper specially when sewing those little fingers. And....you can see that the pieces are perpendicular to the selvedge. 

This is a standing Santa but this doll pattern doesn't have an armature. I have made standing dolls before without and they do stand for awhile but eventually the stuffing settles and the legs lose firmness. You can fix that by opening the legs and putting in more stuffing but I'd rather not. 

I have the body put together and it's standing. I put wooden skewers up through the feet and legs on into the body. The legs are very firmly stuffed. I plan to put Santa on a wooden base and the wooden skewers will be glued into that base to support him. 

I've picked up a few tricks over the years when making dolls. After you have inserted the pipe cleaner into the doll's fingers it helps to clamp them with a hemostat. Why? That way when you are wrapping the pipe cleaners together with tape or thread or whatever method you choose to secure them they stay in place.  Otherwise they move about in the hand and you have to keep resetting them into the fingers. Hope that makes sense.

This is where I got to last year. Now I have to make the head. I think there may be a few swear words. 

I will be back before December 2024. Stay tuned 😀