My family in felt

Another project I spent a lot of time on in the last weeks of 2011 was this family of felt dolls:

It's not just any family, it's my family! For Christmas I decided to gift all my family members a felt doll that looked like him or her, so everyone could have their own "mini-me" and feel powerful like a giant, you know when they needed it.

First, I had to come up with a satisfactory human doll design, so I practiced quite a lot on a high-bunned redhead:

Then I had a little poll on Instagram (find me, I'm @eleventhmonkey) to see if other people agreed with me on the winner. They did.

So I started drawing designs for everyone, which was probably the hardest, because I wanted people's typical hair and clothing styles to be reflected in their dolls. I wanted each and everyone to be unique and recognizable. Yeah, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so sometimes I make my life harder than it needs to be.

Then the craft fair suddenly made an appearance in my schedule and my Christmas present project got put on hold for two weeks.

When the craft fair was over and done with, I quickly returned full force to my little army of felt dolls waiting to be put together. It was two weeks of no cleaning, no laundry, and no cooking (thank you my lovely husband for putting food on our table every night), instead I kept myself busy with cutting felt and sewing these babies:

Three of the human dolls weren't actually for family members, they're going to need to find other homes, and they finally made it to my Etsy shop yesterday:

All the others were giftwrapped and hastily sent to the Netherlands on December 16th. I didn't have much hope that these dolls would make it to my family in time for Christmas, because the birthday gift I'd sent my mom in November had taken almost 3 weeks to arrive. Still I was hoping for a little Christmas miracle... 

Then on the 24th, when the husband and I were vacationing in Las Vegas, I received an iMessage from the homefront informing me the dolls had arrived that day! Right on time for Christmas Eve! I was so happy! All the hard work and rushing had paid off.

My family loved their dolls, and they told me it was very obvious which doll belonged to whom. Score!