Making Muslin Dolls, about muslin dolls, how to make a muslin doll

Making and Sewing Muslin Dolls

About Muslin / Cloth Doll Bodies

about muslin and cloth doll bodies

An assortment of muslin doll bodies.

There are a couple of ways one can make a fabric, cloth, or muslin doll. The first and most time consuming would be to use a doll pattern or design a pattern on your own. Then you must make clothes or design clothes and accessories for your doll.

muslin doll body patterns

Doll Patterns can be found by the thousands in stores and on the internet.

handmade muslin raggedy doll

Here is a doll pattern with a raggedy doll. I changed the clothes, and face size. To make my own design and doll.

There are thousands of pattern companies who sell fabric doll patterns of all sizes, shapes, and colors. You could also buy or design a basic pattern and then change the clothes, hair, face, and accessories around to make different types of dolls.

Searching for a good doll pattern company can be easy with today's magazines, books, and the internet. The advantage of buying doll patterns is you can use them over and over again, and you can redesign the pattern, doll size, clothes, hair, and face yourself as I have in the right photo above.

When making dolls with doll patterns as shown above, it requires one to buy muslin fabric for the doll body, pin the pattern to the fabric, cut fabric, sewing the arms, legs, and body pieces pretty sides together, turn and stuff the body parts, and then sew the arms and legs to the body. All of this process is required to make a doll body.

Yet a simpler way would be to buy the doll or muslin doll body form. This means the doll body is already put together for you as shown in the photo below.

muslin doll body form

This particular method of doll making certainly saves time, however, there is a limited number of doll bodies in different shapes and sizes that can be purchased. Usually a muslin doll like this can be found in 31", 18",11", 8", and 5."

Another method of doll making is to sew the muslin body parts with the clothing parts together to form a doll. This method was VERY popular back in the 1920-1950's. The photo below is a doll made from an original 1942 McCall's pattern. It was very difficult to make with about 15 pattern pieces and very un-clear instructions. In the 1940's just about everyone sewed, so the pattern companies just assumed everyone knew who to make things. The instructions were very vague.

1940's WWII handmade "My Buddy" Army doll

These fabric dolls were known as the "My Buddy" dolls. They came out during WWII and were a big hit with the United States Army and Navy families. As you can see, the muslin face, ears, and hands, are sewn right to the army outfit. This doll body was not made and then "dressed", as you have seen above, it was all sewn together, and then stuffed.

One last type of doll or muslin or cloth body I want to share with you, would be if you purchased your doll body pre-made, but not pre-stuffed as shown in the photo below.

Muslin Doll Body with Face sewn in

As you can see in the photo, I purchased a doll body with the face already sewn in. All I have to do is paint or tea-stain the body, arms, and legs, paint the face, then stuff each part, and last sew the doll body together.