How to make Friendship Peg Dolls Tutorial

This week's How-To is How to Make Friendship Peg Dolls by Ulla, from GermanDolls here on the Natural Kids Team. The following post was for a class on Valentine's Day on her blog GermanDolls, but you can use it any day and it would make a great party favour for a child's birthday!

How to make Friendship Peg Dolls

I knew it! The day would come when I would be able to use all those pretty fabric scraps I have collected over the years - even down to the smallest little bitty one. Of course, my husband won’t believe me. But last week I came up with the perfect project!

I was looking for a craft to do in the classroom with Elementary school-age kids on Valentine’s Day. I realized I still had some wooden clothes pins in my supply box. Not sure why I bought them years ago. You all know how that goes. It’s on sale and you throw it in the basket…We are sure it will come in handy some day. And in this case it did!

All you need for this craft is:
-Wooden clothes pins : I used small ones called baby flat clothes pins! If you use larger ones you may have to cut the clothing for your dolls bigger!
-colorful scraps of fabric, blue jean fabric scraps
-chenille stems or pipe cleaners, cut into 2.5 inch pieces
-glue
-thin tipped marker or pen
-scraps of wool, if you are doll maker you can just use the clippings from cutting your dolls’ hair

Steps:
1.Get your husband to drill holes through the pegs where the arms will go. May be a bit of wait here…Or if you know how to work the drill best to do it yourself. LOL
2.Cut squares of fabric for the peg dolls clothing. We made either skirts or blue jeans for our dolls. For the jeans we cut two one –inch squares. For a skirt one rectangle of about 1 inch by 1.75 inches
3. Cut tops/shirts for your dolls. Cut about 1inch by 1.75 inches
4. Glue on the pants by attaching on little blue jean square per peg leg and wrapping it around the legs when you glue it. A toothpick or long pointy tool will come in handy! If you are doing skirts you’ll have a much easier time! =) To avoid frustration my child took it upon herself to make 25 pegs which had the jeans put on already…

5. Glue on the shirt/top making sure you don't cover up the holes for the arms
6. Insert chenille wire pieces through the predrilled hole and shape hands at the ends
7. Draw a face on your dolly with fine tip marker
8.Glue on hair
With the help of my daughter I made 25 kits to take into the classroom today. Looking forward to the kids faces when they finish their Valentine Friendship Dolls!

Sweet! I love this craft because it helps me teach kids to recycle and make beautifull things at the same time. Now I can work on scaling down my mountain of fabric scraps…I may be offering these kits in my shop in the near future! What do you think?

This tutorial is brought to you by Natalie, of Woolhalla

Please visit Ulla at GermanDolls where you can see her original post and read more on her dolls, needle felting, and life. She is an artist, doll-maker, wife and mother of two, originally from Germany and living in the U.S. In addition to all of this she is the Blog Leader here on the Natural Kids Blog!!