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I just love Hearing how others have learned how to crochet and what projects they have on their hooks. I have known Marie for a few years now, and love her craft ideas and tutorials, and we share a passion for crochet. She is a craft genius and shares her craft projects on her website Craftymarie.com and has shared with me her journey , of how she made a Crochet Doll for the first time (Includes the Links to the Free Crochet Doll Pattern and Video)
Maries Writes about her experience of crocheting a doll for the first time with us to help inspire you to take the next step in your crochet journey. I am so impressed with how her Amigurumi Doll turned out too.
Going from crocheting granny squares, cushion covers and blankets to wanting to make an amigurumi toy doll is pretty daunting. How do you brave the jump from a working in squares and rows to working in continuous circles and adding in stuffing to make a three dimensional design? That's the challenge I recently faced when I made my very first doll.
I spent a while looking for a doll pattern that I really liked the look of and was lucky to find an excellent free step by step tutorial that had lots of photos here:
And also a long video on making the exact same doll that takes you all the way through the process. Since I'd never made any toys before this point, it was even more important that I had both a video and a pattern tutorial to refer to in case I got stuck along the way! The video is just over an hour and a half long so goes into quite some detail.
I'm still a beginner at crochet and with the help of crocheting along to the video and referring to the pattern and tutorial, I was able to complete a doll and also alter it a little more to the taste of my young daughter who couldn't wait for me to hurry up and finish it! It took about a week of working on it during the evenings before I was done.
The original pattern is for a cute doll with a coat, pants and boots. However, my daughter's tastes are very girly so I altered the coat into a dress by adding a belt which was just a long rectangle of 3 or 4 rows of single crochet stitched to the bottom of the coat.
I also added on two ruffles in different colors to make a frilly skirt. These ruffles are just worked in double crochet with 3 double crochet stitches going into every single crochet stitch around the bottom of the coat for the first row and then just add 1 double crochet into every stitch on the next and any subsequent rows. The double crochet stitches then bunch up to make a cute ruffle.
Working in continuous circles makes it difficult to keep track of each row of the pattern unless you mark them in some way - you can use a piece of colored wool to mark the end of a row, a safety pin or buy some stitch markers. I use plastic markers by clover.
The biggest challenge for me in making this doll was stitching her together. As far as the actual crochet goes, she's not that hard to make because it's really just single crochet and being able to increase and decrease. The stitching took a bit of getting used to because it seems wrong at first to pull the yarn through well away from what you're sewing on. However, by the end I was very comfortable with it.
If you're wondering whether you could possibly crochet a doll, I would encourage you to spend some time watching this video or other videos on making dolls if you can because that will help you to see some of the techniques involved and then feel more confident as you realize that making a doll is within your reach.
Marie Williams Johnstone is a lifelong craft addict and has recently added crochet to her favorite way to spend an evening - or two!
You can find her at her blog: http://www.craftymarie.com
I love Crochet Dolls and more importantly my nieces love them and are always designing me a new doll to make for them. I have a few firm favourtie patterns, so now I mix and match from some of them and make my own unique patterns
I have collected my favourite ones here FREE CROCHET DOLL PATTERNS in our popular Page
20 FREE Crochet Doll Amigurumi Patterns
whereYou can see how to crochet the Topsy Turvy Princess Doll, Possibilities are endless
