Two Cute Dolls

Oops it's been such a long time since my last post! What with Christmas and all I just never got around to it.

Included in the wonderful crafty stash I got this Christmas was this book - Cute Dolls. It has bigger versions of some of the cute creatures in The Cute Book as well as a few new ones.

I tried them out for the first time with a friend of mine. She did the panda and I made a penguin.


We sewed them slightly differently to the instructions because we used a different fabric. The instuctions said to use jersey cloth but we didn't have any and used fleecy fabric instead. Their method involved tracing the stitching line and other details onto the back of the jersey cloth which wouldn't work on the fleecy back of our fabric. We used the freezer paper method instead.

They have a few arms and legs that are individually turned through. For the panda (which for some reason is on top of the penguin pattern??)

And my penguin's feet:

The flippers were done the same way but I don't have any pictures of them.

They were a little tricky to sew as the limbs all get stuffed inside the body and sewn on before turning the whole lot through. The penguin was especially tricky because of a rather small hole to turn through and big flippers that didn't really want to go through. There wasn't much room inside the penguin for all those feet and flippers so the flippers were hand sewn on - no way would it fit through my sewing machine.

After that the panda was simple. It was just stuffed and sewn up and the face and tail were attached. Before you know it - a finished panda!


The penguin took a little longer to finish because the head had to be sewn onto the body, which also resulted in quite a floppy neck. However, closer inspection of the pictures showed that their penguins also had very floppy necks. I haven't got a picture of the finished penguin yet because they haven't been uploaded off the camera yet but hopefully they'll come soon!

All in all these dolls took two fairly new sewers a day and a half to two days to make. Of course, we had some help from Crafty Things whenever things went wrong, like the sewing machine eating the fabric as mine seems to have a habit of doing!