As mentioned in previous posts, my oldest daughter had a birthday recently. A lot of emotion and excitement went around for a whole week, especially with her grandparents visiting. We also had our first snowfall. Magical times indeed. But the entire time I have been in some sort of limbo emotionally. I cannot grasp time, I cannot freeze it, and as much as I want it to stop moving for goodness' sakes, it just keeps on rolling.
As I examined our life, my daughter's journey, her birth, her own journey and got to see who she is, the little traits of her personality, that develop more and more into a strong person, I worked on three baby dolls. I am not sure you all know, but this style of baby doll was created by her request exactly one year ago. She asked for a "baby doll that felt like a real baby" so I made her a weighted doll, which she named Jill.
So we realized that Baby Jill turned one year old. Although weighted with two heavy rocks, one inside her head and one inside her belly, a most brilliant suggestion by my friend Juliane, trusted teacher and creator of Froken Skicklig, when I pondered how to naturally weigh her doll (and for lack of proper doll making weighting material) , one year after her seams are intact. This is probably due to the fact that my daughter rarely allows anyone to play with her doll, she treats her as a real baby and most of the time has her tugged in her bed sleeping. Every now and then Jill comes for an adventure, but my daughter is extremely careful with her and sleeps with her doll every single night since they became friends.
Comparing Baby Jill to these three dolls I worked on I noticed a few differences. I seem to make little adjustments to my patterns every single time I make a doll, so once a year goes by the differences are remarkable but I hardly notice them at the time I am working on them. The most striking difference is perhaps their face. While still simple, they have more depth. They also have ears now, and longer fabric joints on the legs so that they can be posed in a myriad of ways.
So we happily discovered that baby clothes in 3-months size (!!) fit quite nice these large baby dolls. My heart wanted to go on an expedition to baby stores, to do more research you know, but we were satisfied with trying on this pink sleeper of soft cotton. Do not panic, I still make all the clothes for my dolls and won't be selling them with commercial clothing, but I thought it would be nice for you to know this fact in case you want to buy clothes for them, as I rarely have doll clothes available for sale individually.
Baby Ninu and her sister Joni are not weighted. I wanted to make them without weight this time in order to be able to offer them to a younger crowd as well, even though they are quite large. I just get worried about the weight sometimes, and the durability of the doll, so this time they do not have weight inside them. They will both become available maybe tomorrow or maybe Tuesday, still so much to do. One will be available comment style here on the blog and one via auction. Ninu is wearing her sister's bonnet, which is the next knitting pattern in the line up. With a bit of luck I will have it all finished up for your knitting hands next week too. Oh, I better go now, Joni just woke up from her morning nap and I am sure there is a diaper for me to change. See you tomorrow.