Hi, I'm Sophie and welcome to my world you know yarn can be used from
everything for making clothing to bracelets to funny little friends
I'm going to teach you how to make your yarn into a princess doll or a boy doll
or an octopus
believe it or not all three of them are made pretty much the same way and i'm
going to teach you how to make them right now
so for this project we're going to need yarn i'm going to be using yellow for
the hair and purple for the body
so I've got two kinds of yarn here i'm going to need some scissors
I've got some little googly eyes I've got a ruler
I have a piece of cardboard that I've cut to eight by 11 and then another
piece of cardboard that I've cut four to six
so 8 x 11 and 4 x 6 then I've also got a pen and I have
some tape and I've also got my glue gun
you can use any kind of glue that you want but i'm going to be using my glue gun
now the reason i have my ruler here is basically I just want to measure down
and mark the center so five and half inches down just so i know where the
center point is now to get started
i'm actually going to get started with the hair first and for the hair
what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a piece of string that is the
same color as the hair and I'm going to make this just slightly longer just
like that slightly longer than my four by six and going to add a little bit of
tape on this side a little bit of tape on this side
now when i do my hair I'm going to be wrapping it around
i'm going to hold down here i'm just going to wrap it around I only need to
wrap this about 20 times unless you want really really lush thick hair
and if you do that's completely fine just keep wrapping but you only wrap about
20 times I've already done that here so I'm going to leave that piece right over
here ready for when we need it later on
now for the body what we're going to do on the body
i'm going to start at the bottom here and sometimes you get these little knots
but you should be able to get those untied gonna just take this now I'm not
laying a piece of string down i don't need to do that for this because there's
so much give here when you use tighter pieces of cardboard like this
they tend to get too tight to stick the little piece of string underneath once
you're done
but when you've got a lot of give from a lot of string it will give you a lot
more give so you don't really necessarily have to put your string down
unless you want to
ok what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold this here and I'm going to wrap long
ways around the 11 inch so I'm just wrapping it around and around and around
now here's the thing i'm going to wrap this 100 times
so as you can guess i'm going to jump ahead
so here is my piece done
it's 100 wraps around my center part is marked what I'm going to do now is I'm
going to actually take some purple string and place it along that center
line right here now because i'm adding hair because i'm adding hair
i'm actually going to just tie it and leave it
so I'm going to tie it here once pulling it very very tight
and twice pulling it very very tight now here's the thing if you've got an extra
set of hands that's the greatest greatest place to use them
now if you want to make the octopus
the octopus doesn't have hair unless you want a hairy octopus so you can skip
this step if you want to make the octopus but if you want to get hair
here's what we're going to do first we need to make our hair
so same thing we just tied off the purple
we're going to tie off our hair same way just going to take those pieces of tape
off going to pull up my string and I'm going to tie this nice and tight and
nice and tight
now here's the thing you can decide if you want to have bangs and if you want
to have bangs then you're going to cut it right here if you want to have
straight hair that goes the same length on both sides you're going to flip it over and
you're going to cut it here
i'm going to give her bangs and I want her to have nice long luxurious hair so
I'm just going to cut right here now if you wanted to do short hair
what you would do is it was like this right
tie it cut it in the back and then you can just cut it to the length you
want it
all right now we're going to come on over here
we still have those two little strings right gonna take those strings going to
feed them under one side and under the other side so that they wrap under make
sure you can see this let me do this one more time here free so we got the purple
tied off here take this string here
slip it under so that comes out the other side and the other one the other
string that's loose slip it under so that they're crossing underneath there we go
and then pull that up and just tie it on the top
the reason you're doing that is just to make sure that it's nice and secure and
it's not going to come undone now
we're going to flip it over find that center point and take our scissors and
cut
now we've got our hair
we've got the starts of our dolly
all we have to do is make a head now to make her head just decide how big we
want that to be pull the hair out of the way and we're just going to take a piece
of this purple string get a piece here
ok we're going to take a piece of the purple yarn figure out how big you want
your head to be then lay this underneath
I'd like to give myself more string then not enough because it just makes it
easier to deal with
and then just pull it and there's her face
now we're going to wait to add all of her things like her mouth and her eyes
we're just going to cut that off right there trim that we don't need that
anymore and we don't need that anymore
now to make her arms
what I'm going to do it looks like when I tied it i missed a few
that's okay because what i can do is just come back with another piece of
string
real quickly tie that in
I love yarn because everything is fixable even if you make mistakes
now remember this is that upper piece this can go away now you don't need this
let's trim that if you were going to make your octopus and you want
your octopus to bounce around that could be his tie off
ok now to make the arms we're just going to separate out some yarn like this
this is about probably like 20 strands and now we are going to braid it so
divide it into three and just start braiding
now you get to decide how long you want your arms to be so I'm just braiding
and braiding braiding and once you get the arms to as long as you'd like them
to be
I mean I always find that sometimes it's better to make them longer rather than
shorter because you can always come back and trim but figure out where you want
it to be
take a little piece of string and just tie it off
this is great for learning those techniques of like knot tying
it's also great for learning braiding
I've got this extra i'm just going to trim it off this makes great tie offs
so hold on to that now I just flip around to the other side and repeat the
process for her other arm and what's great here is you
you can count she's just got one two three four five little braids here so
we're just going to go one two three four
and now we're just going to tie it off again
remember those little pieces of string are great
we're just going to tie it off now for her body she's going to be wearing a
dress and so because she's wearing a dress here
all we have to do is choose where we want to tie it off where we want her
waist to be and we're going to need a pretty large piece of string for this of
12 inches just so you have enough and figure out where you want that waist to
be and then you would just tie it off like that
now here's the thing if you wanted to make an octopus
instead of trimming these and instead of making a tie for the body you would just
separate these into eight pieces and braid all eight remember you wouldn't
have hair unless you wanted a hairy octopus but we divide these into eight
and then you would braid each of the eight sections and tie them off and that
gives you your legs but for your princess or your dress wearer you're
going to give her a waist
and we're just going to tie it up pull this all down so it's nice and straight
and just tie it off
you could use a different color if you wanted to so it looks like a little belt
tie it off you can even put a bow there now if you want to give your person
hands
what you would do is divide it in two like that and then braid this one and braid
this one and that gives you your legs and again just tie off the ends so you
braid braid tie them off and you've got pants now to make the eyes
i'm going to be using googley eyes and i'm just going to glue these on real
quick here
remember just be careful when you're using hot glue it can be hot and these
are tiny little eyes
so just make sure you don't glue your fingers get your your glue on the
eyeballs instead
ok so i got her little eyes on
now if you want to make a little mouth and you want to make that mouth out of
yarn
what I would suggest is use a different color and what to do is take your
different color and just pull a little bit away with your scissors like this
and that
so I've just got it stuck under a few layers there and then just take your
yarn and feed it through to the other side
come through there it is
and now just take this and tie it
and I like to give it a little knot and then cut off the excess and then just
twirl the knot around so that those loose ends are in the back so that you don't
see those
tuck those away so that she doesn't have a
keep going
she doesn't have a ragtag mouth we want her to have a nice mouth
there we go - I buried her eye
come back there we go so see by tucking that under tucking that under
like that she ends up with a nice mouth
now if you have any little loose ends this is the time to cut them off
there we go let's do this real quick just so she has a pretty
little waist we will give her a little bow
so I'm just going to take this and make a little bow then cut this off
actually
there we go so there she has her long luxurious hair she's got her bangs and
she set for the dance
and there you have it the straightforward simple yarn doll and
remember with those slight modifications you can make it any way that you would
like it
for more fabulous ideas made out of yarn and other materials
come and check us out at Sophie - world.com