Decorate your Doll for Valentine’s Day
With this project, your doll can be a Valentine! The headdress is inexpensive to make, and if a hot glue gun is used, it takes little time to complete.
Materials:
Foam board with 1 adhesive side
Fabric
Silk flowers and/or flower petals
Gathered lace
Tacky glue or a glue gun with low temperature glue sticks
Ribbon
PDF pattern(s):
The hearts sizes are roughly for 1/6 (small heart) 1/4 (medium heart) and 1/3 (large heart) dolls. They can be used for many different sizes of dolls, depending on how large you wish the heart to be on the head. The large heart also fits my larger head 1/4 size Annabella (Kaye Wiggs doll) for example.
The hearts have suggested inner openings, but you may prefer to customize the opening size to fit your doll. Cut out the pattern and cut a smaller opening than shown, and keep enlarging it until it fits loosely on your dolls head. (When fitting the pattern, the doll should be wearing a wig unless the headdress will be worn on a bald head.)
~~~~~
Trace out the heart pattern on the paper side of the foam sheet.
Cut out the heart. Figure out your the opening size.
Peel off the paper cover to the adhesive side of the foam and stick it to your fabric. Make sure that the fabric adheres smoothly with no wrinkles or bunching up.
Cut the material out around the heart leaving about a half inch (1.27cm). Cut small slits all around the outside. Cut the slits close, but not quite up to the foam.
Using tacky glue or a glue gun set on low heat, glue the material to the other side of the foam as shown.
Once the material is adhered to the foam heart, gathered lace may be glued around the outside of the heart. Start at the indentation at the top leaving a little extra lace at the end. Pinch the lace at the point as you change direction. At the end, let the lace crisscross over the extra left at the starting point.
Glue lace on the fabric side of the center circle. I like the lace pointing inward, but you can face it either way. Try not to get glue on the material beyond the end of the lace band.
To decorate my heart, I used a mix of silk flower petal parts. All of the parts had five petals, and I folded them so two petals were on one side and three on the other. That way the petals were staggered. The petals look fuller that way, and the foam base gets covered up. Any flower petals will do. Single rose petal packages would work. Some of my flower petals came in a package of mixed colors and sizes, and some came from matching flowers that I disassembled.
When placing the petals, if you are using different colors, make sure you distribute each color evenly around your heart. Leave about a quarter to half an inch of foam base uncovered near the center hole.
Once your heart is covered with flower petals except near the hole, glue lace around the center opening.
Finally, the heart headpiece needs a way to for it to stay on your doll’s head. Elastic cord be stitched through the center lace, but as I was out, so I used ribbon instead. I placed the ribbon so the ties would run on top of the ears and tie under the chin. This allows the ears to help hold the heart headdress in place. My ribbon was folded over once and glued in place under the lace as shown.
For the small size headdress, I put the ribbon under the center lace before I glued it down. It fit best on the doll with the ribbon coming from under the band of the lace. (The doll is Kim Lasher’s Sweet Pea.)
Impldoll Adela’s Headdress is a bit different. Instead of using petals, I used whole flowers. I disassembled them and glued down the petals. I then cut the flower centers off of their stems and glued them in the center of the petals. I filled in gaps between the flowers with leaves. I didn’t add lace around the hole on the front. Once you have the basics, you can use your imagination.
