Sometime last year I stumbled upon Child's Own Studio, a studio where Wendy Tsao creates soft toys from children's drawings. I thought it was the neatest thing I ever saw so I decided to try to make a doll from a drawing by my friend's daughter. You can read about that here if you missed it. I had so much fun making that doll that I wanted to make more dolls. I asked my friends if anyone had any drawings by their kids that they wanted me to try to make. I asked for drawings from kids between 5-11. I think any younger than 5 and they would not appreciate the concept of their drawing being made into a real toy and any older than 11 the drawings might start getting too intricate to recreate.
My friend Juli sent me this drawing by her daughter, Mercy, who was 8 years old.
Mercy's father is a counselor and he asked her to draw a picture of what she thought he did all day at work. The cat is the counselor and the person on the floor thinks the cat is so hilarious that he fell on the floor laughing. The cat is doing its best to look like a counselor by wearing glasses and a wig.
I was very excited to to make a cat wearing a wig! It was such a fun idea! The two challenges I saw were making a wig that would come on and off and making glasses that a child would not lose.
I finally decided to use the nylon from a pair of pantyhose, sew brown yarn into and and use Velcro to allow it to be removable. I needed to test fit the wig and my cat Shifty was more than happy to try it on for size. Or maybe she wasn't more than happy but she stayed still long enough for me to snap this picture.
For the glasses, I decided to make them out of felt and sew them onto the cat itself so they wouldn't be lost. Here is the finished doll!
I find making dolls or stuffed animals from drawings to be challenging because there are no patterns or instructions to follow. You just start and figure out what to do along the way. It is so very rewarding, though, to make a child's idea come to life!
