I think I said how I wished I could just skip ahead to the slip-stitching part. I wish I had left them bald!

I had two skeins of Cranberry colored yarn for the hair. One for each doll, just in case. They don’t give very exact measurements for this part. I was instructed that I needed a 10″x14″ piece of card board and I needed to wrap the yarn around it until it is full. So far, so good. Maybe, just maybe this won’t be as hard as I thought.

 Oh yeah, just so you know, if you put your yarn in a bowl it flops around nicely and doesn’t get tangled on things while it is unspooling.

For the next step, I am to slide the yarn carefully off the cardboard. Then stitch the yarn down to the “wig” base, following the sewing line.

Hmmm. That is an awful lot of yarn to fit under the presser foot. Apparently their idea of full and my idea of full are different. VERY different. I have waaay too much yarn to fit the wig.

I also decided to put a piece of tissue paper under the yarn to keep the feed dogs from munching random yarn strands down into my machine like fuzzy red spaghetti. Probably the smartest thing I did all night!

If I sewed the wig with the yarn facing up I couldn’t tell where the fabric was, or if I was anywhere near the stitching line. The presser foot also wanted to catch the strands with it yarn up.

This is attempt number 3 and success! Attempt number two went well on the bottom, but had some flaws along the top and sides. Thankfully, after wig #3 I can easily fix the problem on wig #2 by removing a few stitches. and only re-sewing the top portion of the wig, instead of re-wrapping the yarn for the 6th time. For your future reference, two wigs for 15″ Raggedy Ann dolls can easily be made from a single skein of yarn.

Slip-stitching the wig was more of a task than I thought it would be. It doesn’t lend itself to being well-pinned in place, and it really wants to creep around while you are hand sewing it down. I do recommend that you center it, pin it the best you can, and work from the center down each side. It didn’t say to specifically, but I also stitched the back of the wig down.

Then it got even more nerve wracking. You have to cut the loops and give dolly a hair cut to make her look right and not like some strange hippy doll. How much do you cut before it is too much and you are making another wig? This is where the failure of wig #2 would have been really obvious. You actually have to fan out the hair so there are loops all down the sides to give her hair along the side of her face. Thankfully I noticed this on the test fit and NOT after I had sewn the thing down.

So after her hair cut, and a quick pass with the lint roller, she got a signature and some clothes. I think she could still use some more hair trimming. Before I made that decision, I wanted to see how I liked it after I had some sleep.

Merry Christmas Little Miss! I hope she is a good friend to you.

 

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