Dress-up dolls

Dress-up dolls
Area: Textile worksops • Class 1 to 2 • Working time: Approx. 2 to 3 hours
Task and motivation
There are different fabrics around us in everyday life, they are meant to dress and protect
us and also serve as decorating elements in our home. Every person expresses himself
through his clothes and depending upon the occasion (work, leisure, festival) selects
garments varying in colour, quality of material and form. Not only elders but children too
always like to transform themselves and try out forms of clothes and disguise.
The traditional dress-up doll in the new form is very useful in learning optical and tactile
differentiation of fabrics and their association with different occasions. Moreover, it is an
ideal medium of self-presentation
for the children.
Focal points of learning
• Optic and tactile differentiation of
fabrics
• Associating fabrics with specific
garments
• Individual creation of a dress-up
doll as a form of self-presentation
• Exact cutting of cardboards and
fabrics
• Neatly pasting fabrics and threads
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Materials and aids
Solid cardboard in white (Format DIN A4), thin grey cardboard if necessary, fabric and
wool leftovers, thin Velcro tape, crayons and markers, UHU Stic, UHU All Purpose Adhesive
Strong, scissors, pencil, ruler, oblong stones.
Designing process
1. Jointly make a human figure (approx. 28 cm tall, 11 cm wide, see sketch on page 3),
draw on a cardboard and cut out. Alternately, photocopy the base form for all, paste
on the grey cardboard and cut out the contours.
2. Draw the face. Glue hair made of wool leftovers, undergarments and socks made of
fabric on the figure using UHU Stic.
3. Cut out top wear from the cardboard using the figure as a stencil. Cover the parts with
fabric. Trim the edges with precision.
4. From the soft Velcro tape cut out an approx. 5 mm wide stripe for the waistband and
glue on the underpants with UHU All Purpose Adhesive Strong. Fix two 5 x 5 mm size
squares on the shoulders (see picture above). Fix small squares cut out from the hard
Velcro tape to the rear side of the clothes at the respective positions.
5. For the foot stand, cut out a 17 x 12 cm piece from the cardboard and divide in four
cross stripes: three 4 cm wide and one 5 cm wide. Lightly scratch into all lines in the
same direction using the tip of the scissors along the ruler, so that they can be bent
better and folded as valley folds. Trim the edge of the 5 cm wide section to give it a
wavy look. Overlap the stripes and glue them together to create a stand with a triangular
cross-section.
6. Glue the doll on this stand and bend slightly forward until it stands well on the stand.
Put stones in the stand for better stability.
Tips
• A simple variation would be to glue the clothes directly on the doll, these can naturally
not be “taken off”.
• Instead of UHU All Purpose Adhesive Strong, you can also use UHU All Purpose
Adhesive Strong Solvent-free, the evaporation time is somewhat longer than the glue
with solvent.
Sybille Rogaczewski-Nogai
© 2004 UHU GmbH & Co. KG, Bühl (Baden) und Elke Fox.
Editing and pictures: Elke Fox.
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