Making of A Queen

Don't know if you are interested or not but I wanted a photo record of the construction of my Queen of Hearts Doll and lacking anything else to post today I decided to do this. Hopefully you'll find it interesting. Warning there are naked doll boobs here!

 Original drawing of the face.

  
This is the largest doll or plush I've ever attempted so far. Her final height is about 21.25 inches tall I think. Her arms are button jointed and move but her legs aren't and don't since the dress I had in mind didn't allow her to sit. After making and attaching her bosom I thought they were too freakishly stripper large and thought I'd have to re-do them but in the end they worked out perfectly. I spent lots of time completely drawing out the doll and how everything would fit together and how her face would look but decided to just wing it on the clothes. HUGE mistake! I don't know what I was thinking! I actually cried at one point thinking I bit off more than I could chew with this one! But Sassy always gets the job done!

  
Here she is in all her naked glory! She was cold and upset that she had no clothes. She unfortunately stood this way glaring at me for almost 2 weeks while I racked my brains for a way to make her clothes and make them queenly enough! If you know anything about me you know I'm a hand sewer and his whole doll and her clothes are completely hand sewn which added to my anxiety.

 A doll friend of mine once told me to make clothes patterns using paper towels. It was a really helpful suggestion! My idea for her skirt was to have 4 flat sides kind of like playing cards stacked upright.

Somehow I didn't get any photos of the creation of the corset. Sigh! I am so proud of how that turned out! The thing about felt is it can be thin and something I've discovered to give it stability is to embroider on it. It's impossible to see in these photos but the front and back of the fan piece of the corset has decorative stitching on it as does the red inset of the corset itself. 

  
The corset, fan piece and the red lace trimmed panties required hours of work.

 When I finally designed and sewed the dress I realized she wouldn't be able to stand on her own and spent some anxious moments trying to figure that out. Did I mention I've NEVER done this before?! So my idea was to make a long tutu kind of underskirt thing. It has two layers, black underneath and red on top. Only because I didn't buy enough black but you can't see it anyhow so who cares?

 Once her headdress and jewelry were on she was ready to go!

A better view of her back. She's standing on a cardboard circle so her dress wouldn't get muddy. It's been crazy rainy here.

I would have done more detail to her dress but I was running out of time and still needed to make her flamingo croquet mallet and a down and dirty 1/2 an hour to make hedgehog ball.

I love her and learned so much in the making of her. I can't wait till next year for ADO's next blog event! I received so many lovely comments from some awesome "real" doll makers that I'd like to make more dolls.

Thanks so much for reading thru this long and rambling post! Will show a sneak peek of a new project tomorrow.