My Janet Arnold pattern-book-sized doll, I'd guess about 8" or 9". She's wearing a miniature of the same cut of sack back gown as my Flora MacDonald red plaid gown, and the striped cloth I used for her dress is from a vintage child-sized sleeve that sat in someone's quilt stash for god knows how long. I think I'm justifiably proud of her.


More pictures here.
She's actually a re-make, thought I didn't do much to her body or clothes. What I did re-make were her head and hands.

The original was fairly stark and awful, one of my first attempts as an adult at doll making, over 10 years ago. The head was a hard plaster cast of a sculpted polyclay head that had not stood up well in baking, and had been painted starkly in black, white and red, with REALLY BIG EYES. Then I glazed it with nailpolish, which had yellowed badly. Her old wig was also awful, nicely styled but human hair (WAY out of scale, like me using phone cable to make a wig for me- really coarse and stiff), and stark black. :P Her hands and feet were unpainted white polyclay, and nicely sculpted, but glazed with nailpolish and also badly yellowed.

I took her clothes off, steamed them, mended them, and set them aside. I pried off her old wig and wiped her down with acetone until she was clean, and sewed the loose leg back onto the body. Then I set about re-sculpting her face over the old thin, stark, stained plaster base. I mixed up some colored, thinnable putty with lightweight spackle, latex caulk (low-budget acrylic medium - i have no money and this was on hand), white acrylic for opacity and a drop or two of terracotta colored miniature paint from Chris's stash. The idea behind stianing the plaster was to give her skin more depth than just flat painting would.

It took a couple of days to do, since I had to layer it on in places to do advanced things like giving her her ears (there were none on the original sculpt), making hollows in the eyesockets (to paint in the pupils for depth before filling them with clear glaze), re-scuplting teh lips and nose so they looked real, and building up real 18thc. ideal plump cheeks. I overpainted her face very lightly, just basically giving it light washes of color to make it more lively, and painting in the lips. The eyes were especially fun as I finished the whole face including glazing the eyes and then built up the eyelids and gave them their shading. Only the lower lip and the eyes have any shine to them.

I painted the arms and upper thighs to match her face and neck, and had to re-sculpt the left hand to hold a book as the thumb had been lost and my putty mixture was too soft to build a durable thumb without a support.

Then I re-dressed her and re-wigged her with some ramie fiber I have lying around. It does a farily nice job of pretending to be blond har, plus it curls really well with water wehn wrapped around a needle. I still need to make her some little shoes, but I think she's done enough to show off.