On A Spoonful of Sugar!

For the past few months my off and on project has been a 1960's Mary Poppins doll. I was being obsessively nit-picky over details on this and spent a lot of time pouring over the costume details in the movie before working on it.

Background is my mom's childhood Mary Poppins book.

I came across an original 1960's pattern for this on Etsy for about $35 and not being willing to spend that much was extremely happy to find it available as an inexpensive download. 

For such a small doll this was a fairly time consuming project because of all the hand sewing! 

The skirt is one of the only things I followed the instructions on. I'd never done pipping, so that was a new experience and lining a skirt this small was a challenge in itself.

I made a considerable amount of adjustments to the pettiblouse. The pattern called for ruffles down the front, which I skipped since there are no ruffles on the blouse she wears at the beginning of the movie. I also added sleeves because it just seemed wrong for Mary Poppins to go sleeveless! I'm guessing it's because of the gloves they were excluded and while it was a pain to add them, I'm really glad I did.

As you can see, they still need some sort of closure at the wrists, but I haven't decided on how I want to do that.

Lack of tiny buttons in my stash led to the use of French knots that I'm considering a rather satisfactory substitution.

Another change was on the ruffle at the bottom, which is shorter than it should be. I hadn't been able to find eyelet edging that I liked, so I ended up taking some lace, sewing it to a strip of white fabric, and then gathering it to make the ruffle. 

Hook and eye and snap closures.

The pattern said use knit for the stockings. I used muslin. After struggling to get them on, I understand why.

The only thing I would have done differently under normal circumstances with this part of her outfit was to have tried to see if I could find white on white striped fabric for this since in the movie Mary Poppins has yellow stripes on her blouse, however, I don't think the solid white looks too bad.

Moving on, the hair is made out of pearl cotton thread, which might be my new go to for doll hair since it looks so nice. It took a little over three hours to do her hair including having to re-loop the skeins because they were too big to properly loop around for the bun. I'm actually not entirely sure how I got it to look this way, but I can tell you I stitched it together as fast as I possibly could once it was in this position!

The hat took about four hours. Once again I ignored the pattern instructions to do just a few loops of ric-rac around the brim and put it on the entire hat. Overall, despite the amount of time it took I think it was well worth it. I had flowers left over from my Shakespeare hair wreath that were easy enough to turn into daisies with a little bit of yellow felt and some careful trimming of the petals. For the "cherries" I was debating on using beads when I remembered I had these vintage floral pieces that were given to me. Not quite round as the movie embellishments, but good enough!

The boots, like the hat, had to be hand-sewn with each boot taking about two hours. As with the blouse, I used French knots to make the faux buttons.

As is apparent from the pattern picture, there are still a few components to be made, most noticeably the coat. Since I spent so much time trying to figure out the color of the movie coat (a dark purple), I'd rather look at the felt before I buy it. I also need to see the yarn for the scarf before embarking on the adventure of trying to crochet it (one hand makes crochet a challenge). Additionally, I don't like the embroidery pattern for the carpetbag and want to find a fabric to use once stay at home orders lift and I feel comfortable going to the fabric store again. Eventually I'd also like to make an umbrella and a few other accessories not included with the pattern, so there may be part two to this post at some point!

For now, though, I think my Mary Poppins doll is practically perfect in every way!

♥ ♥ ♥