Some bits and pieces about my dolls' hair and techniques I've tried

Welcome everybody, hope you are all well and keeping warm out there.

So today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how I do my dolls' hair. Obviously I am still learning and there are always new and improved techniques out there, but up to now most of my dolls have had crocheted wigs with wool or cotton latched on,

or merino wool tops arranged and needle felted secure.

I have to say I love the effect of curled wool, for bouncy, full hair, I'm so jealous really, I always wanted hair like this:

The curls are achieved by wrapping wool around dowels, dampening down and baking in the oven gently for about 50mins.

But wrapping wool around wood and bunging it in the oven wasn't my first try at something like this; I tried with ribbon first with some not so successful results.

Here is a blog post about my trials and errors in this technique.......................250-degrees-is-that-warm-or-hot????

And believe it or not I made exactly the same mistake when I started to make soap, when will I learn to double check Centigrade or Fahrenheit? But that's another story.

I'm working on a custom order for a Nightmare before Christmas Sally at the moment,and I remembered to take a bit of work in progress stuff so here it is:

 step 1: crochet a cap for your doll's head that will be nicely tight fitting
















step 2: wind the wool, or in this case cotton, round something. Now I use my phone for this and to take photos, so I'm afraid I couldn't take a photo of this bit. Then cut it across the top, giving you lots of lengths of the same size thread, pick something that will be twice the length you want the hair to end up. Have a cup of tea, very important that bit.

step 3, pulling the thread through the stitches in the cap, knot them in place, a latch tool is good for this, but the holes were too small in this case so I had to use a crochet hook. I hope the video demonstrates this better, but if you want more details please do comment or get in touch and I'll try to answer any questions

and the final results

Well this post seemed to get monopolised by the crochet cap technique, so the next hair post will be about needle felted hair to make up for it, but I've kept you long enough for now, please do leave any comments or questions. I love to hear from you, next week will be about changes to the website. Please come back and check me out soon.
Hugs and Kisses

Ally