Paper Dolls with Cloth Clothes (Unplug Your Kids)
The stars aligned this week, and the Unplug Your Kids theme of clothing reminded me of a project I had wanted to do back when I was still printing things from the third-oldest computer and copying things at Kinko’s. Now that I have my happy printer-that-copies, it was easy to put this project together, and the kids LOVED it.
We made paper dolls of the kids! Instead of making paper clothing with the little tabs, though, we cut out clothing from cloth scraps.
First I had to take a picture of each of the kids in their skivvies in front of a blank background. Turns out there’s not a blank background in my entire house, but I made do with a cream-colored blanket hanging from the door.
One thing I don’t have my hands on yet is a fancy-pants photo editor, or even a not-fancy one. Instead of waving my magic mouse and making the backgrounds disappear, I did what I’ve always done: I printed out the pictures and then cut away the backgrounds.
Then I taped these cutaway photos onto a blank piece of paper and made color copies of them. Ta-da! Paper dolls! I made three sets – one to work from, one to glue to the top of the box, and one on cardstock to be a doll that the kids could move around.
We traced around the paper dolls to make a paper pattern for each, and used this pattern to cut shirts, pants and dresses.
We stopped by the fabric store to pick out a few fun patterns (a quarter yard of flannel is just 50 cents) and a few interesting remnants. JediBoy enjoyed choosing fabrics, but it was hard for him to remember that big patterns just wouldn’t work on a 5″ person!
I did the tracing and cutting for BabyGirl’s clothes, but JediBoy proudly did everything himself: tracing and cutting to make a pattern, then tracing the pattern onto fabric and cutting it out. He even added black stripes to his red shirt to make it match the one he loves to wear.
We used Mod Podge (decoupage glue) to glue one set of dolls to the top of plain white pencil boxes (about $1 at the craft store) and give them a thin layer of sealant. This was our one little oops – the printer ink ran a little bit, giving the box-top kids a nice rosy glow! But it’s not terrible. The boxes are great for keeping the clothes in.
The kids are really enjoying these paper dolls. They love to dress themselves! I can see that any time we do a fabric project, we’ll have to keep aside the scraps to make more clothes for our paper doll boxes.
February 22nd, 2009 at 8:04 pm
These are awesome. I’m absolutely going to copy this project when we get back home to our printer-that-copies and stash of material.
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Great project–thanks for spelling it out for us!
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:27 pm
very cute!
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
I love them!
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
They look great! Nice idea to use the boxes.
February 23rd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Those are very cool. My daughter would like to do that.
By the way GIMP is an open source program like photoshop if you are interested.
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
What a fantastic idea! I’m going to add you to my google reader now just so I can star this. I think my 15 month old would actually “get” this. If I could get him to sit still long enough for me to prepare it. Hmm, some day!
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm
these are so great!! what a great twist on paper clothes!! I wish I had a colour printer.. this is sucha cool idea!! love the kids in their underwear
my girls are always in their underwear so wouldnt be too hard for them!!
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
These are so cute. My son went to Birthday party once where the Mom made each kid one of these!
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:34 pm
What a cute idea! My little girls would love this.
February 23rd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
This is so great! My kiddos would LOVE their very own paper dolls!
February 24th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Super cute idea. Looks like loads of fun!
February 24th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
That is SO cool!
February 26th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
what a super idea!
February 11th, 2010 at 9:16 am
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