Our talented ten year old neighbor, Gia, is the best mother’s and babysitter! She brings toys and thinks of new activities to do with my four year old while I’m working or teaching. Last week, after writing class, I wandered over to the dining room table to see what they’d been doing. I found them playing with a homemade paper doll and doll outfits. The girls were pretending, imagining, and engaged. I couldn’t wait to write a post about this fun and easy idea.
Draw the Body and Cut Out
Gia drew a girl body, decorated her and cut her out.
Trace the outline and use to design an outfit
She turned the doll over, drew the outline, removed the doll from the paper and used the outline to design an outfit. Once she’d designed the clothes, she cut out the clothes, adding on tabs. Simple. Brilliant.
Later on, my seven year old took to the project with gusto, creating a paper doll city, with dolls of all shapes, sizes and colors, rooms and houses. (See above) She even made a daddy paper doll for daddy when he played with her.
Younger children can draw basic people with a circle head, rectangle or triangle body, and lines for legs and arms. Help them cut out the shape so they, too, can make their own paper doll.
Thanks, Gia!
Welcome!
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Melissa,
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I sooooooo remember doing this as a kid!
Wendy
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My mother sewed all of our clothes when we were growing up. My sister and I used to make paper dolls from the models in old pattern books that the fabric store gave us when they got new ones. We would find a figure that had a beautiful face and we would cut out her head, shoulders and upper torso. We would cut off her arms. Then we would cut out outfits for her from similarly sized figures by cutting tabs on the shoulders and cutting off the model’s head and then cutting out all of the rest of the figure. A single pattern book could yield a large number of dolls (heads) and outfits for women, men, children and infants…A veritable city of dolls.
Those of you who sew will remember that the newer patterns in the front of the books are full page large illustrations, but in the back of the book, the older patterns are half page and smaller. You could have two sizes of dolls that way with proportional clothing and the small dolls were great for playing in a small area—like your bed when you were sick and had to stay home from school!
To make homes for our dolls we scoured the women’s magazines like Woman’s Day and Better Homes and Gardens for full page ads that showed a room in a home. Eventually we netted kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms. On a rainy day we took over our entire living room at home and spread out our “houses” all over the floor. Then we populated the “houses” with whole families of paper dolls in wonderful designer clothes who went visiting back and forth for hours!
I wish I had kept my homemade paper dolls. I have such fond memories of the time spent making and playing with them.
I love that… I remember doing that when I was a kid!