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Lainey and Lulu

I'm excited to start off my blog with this project; a custom doll I made for my daughter for her 6th birthday.



My youngest daughter is definitely her own person.  She loves Darth Vader but is still a ballet dancer, and in one of her most recent quirks, she has been asking for a pet ant.  We've talked about how ants are really colony animals, so having just one would be hard, but she was insistent that she wanted just one pet ant that she would name Lulu.  Wanting to deliver on her wish, I did get her an ant farm so she can have some real ants, but I also made her a Lulu along with her own custom Lainey doll.

I found the pattern for the ant on Pinterest, from a website called Amidorable.  You can find the link here.



 She suggests putting pipe cleaners in the legs so you can bend them into shape.  I think this is ingenious, and discovered folding the pipe cleaner at the end helped me to feed them through the leg a little easier.  My daughter has been sleeping with the ant in her bed, so the pipe cleaners are popping out a little bit.

As for the Lainey doll, I used the My Crochet Doll book for both the doll and her clothes.  I made a few adjustments to the body, and had to make several adjustments to the clothes to get them to fit correctly.  One of the changes I did make was giving her feet.  I'm not sure how the shoes would really fit otherwise.


I love the stripes on the shirt, but have to say they took forever!  It was worth the work, but I didn't expect the color change between rows to be so time intensive.  The hair was also a little difficult.  This was the first time I attempted creating a doll with hair, and learned a lot in this process, as well as from some online tutorials I watched after the fact.  Luckily my daughter has crazy hair no matter what I do, so she and the doll match well.  I added a little headband to help tame the craziness.



All the clothes are removeable, which is good because Lainey's got her eye on a bear outfit from the same book for her doll.  All in all the gift was a success, and I've got requests to make another custom doll for a friend of mine.

I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Sport for the doll, and some Knit Picks Brava for the ant.

Any questions or comments, please post below.  I'd love to hear from you!
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