DeGaray Dolls

These are the steps I followed for making an adorable leather-covered mini top-hat!  Firstly, I cut a loo roll* down to size for the tube part (I know, so 'Blue Peter') and cut a circle out of stiff card. Out of this I cut the centre circle for the top of the hat, using a sharp cutting knife. This circle has to be equal to the internal size of the tube, even a few millimetres smaller depending on the thickness of the fabric covering it.  (*If making a full-size hat, this would of course be too small, and the circumference of the doll's head would have to be used as the correct circumference) Then I cut a piece of leather long enough to cover the circumference of the loo roll tube plus an extra 1-2cms to make a neat fold-over at the join. I also gave it 1cm extra width at each side, so that it could be folded over and glued to the inside of the tube. Again for this I used UHU glue because it dries fast and glues leather rather well (although you usually have to keep

Finally Hujoo Berry has a nice pair of leather boots! And I'm pretty sure she loves them just as much as I do ;) I basically followed the instructions from the Ryo Yoshida book (in so far as my non-existant understanding of the Japanese language would allow!). First I carefully drew around her feet in pencil on some thin card, adding a bit extra for the shape of the front of the boot. In the book it shows the feet removed, but I didn't do this (because I was feeling too lazy to!). Although it probably would have been slightly less fiddly if I had, it didn't really make too much of a difference. This is what it looked like:    Then I wrapped the feet in clingfilm to protect them, because  the next part was to create a moulded toe-cap using a small quantity of air-dry clay. I used La Doll Premix,which I'd heard a lot about as being a commonly used clay for BJD making. This is a premixed version of two types of air-dry clay which the La D