A few months ago when I became interested in making art dolls I showed you a picture of a red and white apron that would eventually turn into Swivel Head Sally. This apron was from a box lot I won at an auction for $1.00
I draw all of my own patterns so when I was thinking about her torso I thought of two triangles, one inverted so the waist was small. I created the body out of the red fabric because there was more polka dot fabric and I knew I wanted to make the legs real long.
I was only going to use the fabric from the apron to create this doll. I went ahead and cut out a little red skirt. I had in mind to layer the polka dot fabric with the solid fabric. There wasn't enough to do this so I went to my fabric stash and picked out three random pieces of fabric that I had leftover from other projects.
Eventually I would use the decorative stitches on my sewing machine to "hem" each layer.
This is swivel head Sally waiting for her head:
She was without a head for some time because I didn't want to make another fabric head. They are art dolls because one uses different mediums in the same design. I decided I would mold a head out of Celluclay. This would be fun because I could get my three and five year old boys involved too.
This head turned out to be her sisters head because I wanted Sally's a little bit more round and this ended up being very flat on the bottom. But I ended up doing something a little bit unique with this form that I'll tell you in the next blogpost.
Meet Swivel Head Sally:
Her ponytail sits right on top of her head and is held by a scrap of fabric from one layer in her skirt. After I painted her face I sealed it with Delta Ceramcoat Interior Varnish. Then I painted the free form design on her torso.
And last but not least her shoes...
Before I painted the red and white polka dot fabric blue I coated it with Aleene's Fabric Stiffener and Draping Liquid. This has a total of about five coats including a sealant. After everything was dry, the very last thing I did was to lace up her little ballet type slippers.
