Sunday, December 16, 2007

Frugal Gift # 12 ~ Clothespin dolls

This was Jonathan's afternoon project today: Clothespin dolls for Megan's Christmas present. This is pretty simple and fun project and a gift that I know Megan will love. All you need is old fashioned clothes pins, fabric scraps, yarn for hair, hot glue gun, glue and Magic markers to make the face. You can also use ribbon, lace and other odds and ends to make them fancier. Jonathan drew the faces, cut the hair and cut out scraps for clothes and I glued them all together. To make different sizes of dolls we just cut some of them shorter.

We had made this set a little over a year ago when we were studying a lot about pioneers. We had tons of fun making the claim shanty, furniture, covered wagon, outhouse, people, well, root cellar, etc. We still have this and the kids enjoy playing with it. We do treat it carefully and keep it up on a shelf when not being played with as the house isn't super sturdy. This is incredibly cheap to make (use whatever you have on hand and a glue gun) yet it can provide hours of fun.
It was tons of fun for all of us to work together to make it. Everybody had a new idea for something that we definitely needed. We were trying to think of what the Ingalls would have had and limiting ourselves to that. I hope you have as much fun as we have with this simple toy.

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3 comments:

Betsy said...

Abbi, check out this fun carrying case for those cute little dolls: http://madreadoptiva.blogspot.com/2007/12/handcrafters-holidays-blog-meme.html

Edi said...

Can you believe I made clothespin dolls with my grandma, probably 30 some years ago...

I wonder how long they have been made into cute little people - my children and I made some about a year ago...very fun.

For an older child you can make it all into a craft gift that they can make themselves...include instructions, clothespins and bits of fabric, sequins and whatnot, yarn for hair...

I never thought of cutting the "legs" down to make some "children" - great idea.

Abbi said...

Thanks for the comments. Betsy I did go see the little carrying bag. It was cute, I also had fun browsing the blog.

The kit idea is a good one. My older kids love kits.

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