Paper Doll Crafts

In grammar school, I would sometimes walk with my sister over to my grandmother’s house after school. Grama worked, so we would be at her house alone, or with one of our aunts. Still, it wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Soon, as children are wont to do, we found a girl on the next block and became fast friends. Her family had emigrated from Korea a short time before and her parents and older siblings were never at home either.

Homemade Paper Dolls
Homemade Paper Dolls

We discovered a shared love of arts and crafts. Paper dolls offered a cheap way of expressing our creativity. She could draw people in a style I now recognize as manga. Our friend was perfectly willing to draw dolls and dresses and other clothes and we would play for hours. I remember a discussion of her being a fashion designer where she told me in no uncertain terms that she was going to be a doctor.

I don’t remember why we lost touch, but we did, as children often do. I still have the paper dolls, however, and, as a result, I think about her on occasion.

Amy, of The Creative Mom Podcast, as she often does, brought paper dolls to my mind again with her episode #67, the Shape of Paper. She sent me on a trip around the web looking at various paper doll websites. I found a cool site, Kiddley, with some good basic paper doll outlines that offer a lot of scope for imagination. Wouldn’t it be cool to make fabric clothes with your quilt fabric? A great use of scraps!

I’d be interested to hear your stories of paper dolls in your life and see pictures of anything you make in the paper doll realm.