 you follow me on social media, you've seen this before. So when this whole... this is not going to be a long story, so just sit back and relax for a little bit. This is not going to be a short video. I don't think so anyway. When this whole craziness started with 2020 and the pandemic, and if you're watching this in the future and you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, Google the year 2020 should be blatantly obvious. Anyway, as we were all struggling with the pandemic and other various world issues that were happening all the same time, I... we couldn't go anywhere, we couldn't go out and do anything, so I started investigating what I had in my art room, projects I hadn't done in a while, techniques I hadn't used in forever, and really trying to find a way to work out the stress and anxiety about the situation in my art, in my mind, besides talking about it with trusted friends and families, what other way could I use to deal with that? And this project was one of them, and while yes, it helps me work out the stress of whatever is going on, it also just makes me smile, and you could totally just do these just because they're fun to make, and it has become that for me. I did eventually make this coffin shaped box to store them in, out of just packaging, cardboard packaging, tissue paper that these laser cut wood pieces are from my friend Mike Deacon's online shop, which I will link in the video description. I don't really have a lot of video of making this, although it is, you know, there is some clips in a vlog, but really I just cut coffin shaped pieces of cardboard, one for the top, one for the bottom, and then I covered the sides in more cardboard, I taped them together. Once that all was dry and done, I covered the whole thing in a layer of crumpled up tissue paper and gave it a good paint job. I started with a black base, and then I sponged on some colors like this. Inside here, I have shrouded in a piece of cotton my project projects. So before this all happened, I had thrifted this kit for gorgeously gruesome zombie dolls. And it came with this book, and it came with some patterns, and it came with some felt and other, a few other supplies. And I have used the pattern for some of the dolls in this box, but I have since then graduated designing my own patterns. And this definitely gave me a starting off point, but I really wasn't into like making a Venus flytrap zombie. There's a cell phone one in here, which is cute and all, but it really wasn't what I was looking to do. That being said, I think it's a good book. And I think if you can find the book or the kit thrifting or on eBay or something, I do recommend it as a starting off point. It is a really good one. It was fun to use and still is occasionally fun to reference back to. I don't do things the way they did in the book, but it's a fun starting off point. So what happened was I started making zombie dolls. This is a different thing. So we'll put that aside. My first one was, where is she? Here we go. This is Miss Coronavirus. And she was the first one that I made. I obviously used the pattern from the book and then I just went sideways with it from there. I stitched her around the edges with a blanket stitch and I did the sort of suturing stitch my own way. I didn't do it the way they said in the book and covered her in beads and yeah, she's real cute. I've also done Mr. Shut Your Mouth. So at some point we just feel like we are unable to say much or nobody's listening, right? This one is Mr. Stay Safe. You know, covered in his little PPE suit full of bubble wrap and he's got his face mask on. This one is Miss Front Lines with her little stethoscope made out of the guts from a dead pair of earbuds because you know, I never throw anything away. This one's funny, Mr. TP Shortage. And on the bottom of this box are a bunch of extra little rolls of toilet paper I made when I made him. This one is Miss Taken Faith. This one is Miss Information. I do name them all. I have a running list of zombie doll ideas and then I start with an idea, a name for the doll and then I create the doll from there. This one is Mr. Wash You Hands because you know, we're all told ad nauseam to wash your hands. This one is Miss Stay At Home. You know, feels like she's just locked up inside. This one is a recent edition and this is Mr. Social Distance. You know, he's just totally cute. And then I've since made a couple of more. This one is Miss Dead Water and this one is Mr. Bloodsucker. So I'm going to, these are two newer patterns. They are not patterns from the book at all. And I am going to show you how I did these. And you can definitely do this and you know, just have them be sort of a decoration. You can do like I do and work through issues with them. I'm going to first show you how I do some of the stitches because I do use some stitches in a very kind of unique way and attach things in a unique way. So we're going to go over that first and I'll be right back. Years ago, and I'm talking about 20, see 2008 or earlier back in the day, who remembers Doty dolls or art dolls? So I made a lot of these prior to 2008. I was in a one of these artist cooperative gift shops. I had a booth full of stuff. One of the things I sold was these little art dolls. These are mini mini version. I don't I've sold or given away all the larger versions that I made. The larger versions were about the same size as the new zombie dolls I've been making. And these are some minis that I made at that time. And some of the stitches like the blanket stitch edging and different embroidery stitches I've used on these are the same ones that I'm using on the zombie dolls. So yes, the book gave me the idea to make a zombie doll, but I've been making little felt dolls for a really long time. These, if you're not into the zombie doll thing, you definitely could make something like this. Now these particular ones, these are just basic heart and star shapes, sort of an abstracted art doll kind of shape. These, the pattern for these, and my version of the zombie doll is going to be available in the Etsy store. And the link is down below. I'll show you that in just a minute. In the meantime, let's get started with showing you how to do a couple of basic stitches. Let me set up and I'll be right back. Okay, to get start me started making your own little felt dolls, whether they're zombie dolls or something else, you're going to need a few supplies. So you're going to need some felt felt, you're going to need some embroidery floss, buttons, beads. I use googly eyes a lot. A couple of years ago, I picked up these brightly colored googly eyes. You can glue them on your doll. I don't. I actually poke holes in the sides. And let me stand up. I poke holes in the sides of the eyeball with a pokey tool and then stitch it down. You're going to need some stuff, something to stuff the doll and sewing needle, a sharp one, and some scissors. I recommend, before you get started with anything else, taking your pattern. This this is an 11 page document that you can get in my Etsy store. It includes materials and the stitches that I usually use more commonly to make my dolls, basic instructions and some tips, pictures of some of the dolls I've made over the years, including close up shots of some of the things, the decorations on the dolls, cleaning the little mini art dolls. You recognize this is a paper clip. So is that. You can use anything really to decorate them. This is one that I've made. I don't have it here on the table with me. And she's not, the whole front of the doll is all painted with acrylic paint onto canvas. And then she stitched around the outer edge and stuffed. So you can definitely do that too. I would love to see what you all do. You know, take it and go sideways with it and make it your own and share in social media. Tag me in the post. I would love to see what you do with it. Now, you do get the basic patterns for all the dolls, zombies and otherwise. Now, I recommend, you'll see, I pulled these out so you guys can see that you print your patterns that all are just maybe the ones you think you're going to use. And then I'll tell you what this is in a minute. And then you glue them to some chipboard or maybe to a cereal box or heavy card stock and then cut them out of that, especially if you think you're going to make more than just the one doll. It makes cutting, even if you make one doll, it makes cutting the pattern out easier. So I usually take my dolls and I, the patterns and I cut them out of chipboard or cereal boxes or if I only have card stock, I use card stock. These are the patterns from the book. I said I've used those. These are some patterns for some pin cushions, but also what's on here are the mini doll patterns. Now, these are cut out of a plastic. This is retail store display signage. I used to be a retail display merchandiser and at the end of the season, this signage was just tossed in the trash. So I occasionally asked the store's permission to take one or two pieces home just to make, I used it for making sewing patterns, to be honest. That has some pin cushion patterns on it too, but anyway, and then these are the large ones. So having something like this, whether it's thin plastic or it's a cereal box, to cut your patterns out of is a good idea. I've included the zombie mermaid pattern, which is adapted from, where did I put her? I put her away, adapted from my mermaid art doll, which is this one. So the difference is, of course, I gave the zombie mermaid arms and the original art doll pattern doesn't have arms. I included little patterns or suggestions for different shapes of eyes that I like to do. I included some bones and arm. I'll explain why in a minute. Eyelids, faces. Now, when I did the art dolls, I would embroider their faces separately and then stitch it down. You definitely could do that for the zombies. I haven't as of yet, but you could do that. I find myself putting hearts on the zombies a lot and or in the case of our Miss Dead Water, she has a broken heart. I also included a basic gingerbread man style zombie pattern. He is a reduction in size of an old pattern of mine that I have for dammit dolls. Who out there remembers dammit dolls? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll try to find something on the internet somewhere and post a link in the video description. But I have an old dammit doll pattern. I reduced him in size and then I did cut his head off in case you want to do a head separately from the body. So there's two different style of heads. I included a skull cut out and a blood drop. I also included my old art doll patterns. So here is a mermaid, some wings. This is your basic oval shaped egg shaped body. Any of which could be adapted to be a zombie doll. And then these other bodies and the original art doll face. These are the original patterns from like 2007 or whatever 2006 when I started making our dolls. So this is all, this all comes in the download that's over in my Etsy shop. Again, the link is in the video description. So print the document. You can resize the pattern pieces to be smaller or bigger. If you want to make a bigger doll or a smaller doll, it's just a matter of resizing the pattern to be the size that you want and then cutting it out. And then you have your patterns ready to go. I do have some of these on here. Now these are suggestions for stitches or designs for the ribs. You can use it as a template to paint your decorations on your fabric, to stitch. You could cut all these little pieces out of felt and and put them on and stitch them down with a lot of little fidgetly pieces, but you could definitely do that. You could also, like I did in this one, I use it as a template for some embroidery stitches to mimic the ribs and where they would be. All right. Now on to stitches, shall we? All right. So I have a piece of muslin here in an embroidery hoop. And if you have been following my slow stitching adventures for a while, you know, I don't often use an embroidery hoop because yeah. So the first thing we will do is I'll show you my version for how I do these sort of suture-y stitches. I do a couple of different ones. So the basic one, you come up from the bottom and then go, I don't know, it depends on how big you want your sutures apart and how long you want this, but I generally do about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch. I'm going to put it in here, but then I'm going to go straight up from that stitch about half of the length of the, of this here, the space here for more the threads coming up to the needle like this. Then I'm going to go down over here. Then I'm going to go up here. I think of it as a modified sort of a back stitch. I have said repeatedly on my channel over the years, I am not the frugal crafter, that's Lindsey Weirich. I am the lazy crafter and the less times I have to go down and then back up and reach around and the happier I am with my stitching because I like to get at least two steps in at once. So that's your basic suturing stitch, which is nothing new and has been around the internet for like a million years. I'm sure there's probably somewhere else on the on YouTube and the internet that shows you how to do that. So we'll tie that off. It's good to practice on just some plain piece of fabric like this one. Then there's another one that I occasionally do, which is more fun. So I'm going to start the same way, only when I come up, I'm going to come up sort of at a diagonal and I'm going to come down over here and I'm going to come up from straight up and then I'm going to go down over here and then come up in a straight line here and then now see, if you have a little space right here, can y'all see that? If I like split the clip here and I'll zoom in a little bit, there's a space right here. So if that happens, never fear. Go underneath your X, go down in that hole and unless you're filming it like I am, nobody will ever know the difference. Okay, so because I did that, now I have to do this thing underneath here. There we go. So that now you have that. So that's two different sort of ways. I think it's wrinkly. Oh, there we go. So two different ways sort of to do your suturing stitches on your zombie doll. Thread off again. You of course can do a basic running stitch, which has a space in between each stitch. Usually the space is about the same length as the stitch itself. So go down about a quarter of an inch or an eighth of an inch and then come back up an equal distance. Now, if you're doing a back stitch, which I do sometimes, you would do your running stitch, but then you would go back over here, then you would come up about that quarter of an inch space. And you can see the difference. It just creates a broken line versus a filled line, right? Sometimes I do French knots on my dolls. I did them on Mr. Bloodsucker for blood drops coming out of his mouth. And to do a French knot, which I learned after years of being frustrated with French knots, I learned the proper way from Ann Brook textile artist here on YouTube. I'll link her channel below. Come up from the bottom, hold your thread, pointing away from your hole, take your needle, wrap the thread three or more times around the needle, tightly if you want a neat knot, loosely if you want a messy knot, and then put the needle in back into or near the hole that you came out of. Put your thumb here on that thread and then you have a French knot. Should we do that again? And that, by the way, that was four times around if I'm not mistaken. And this is with six strands of floss. So the bigger you want your knot, the more floss strands you use and the more times you wrap it around. All right, so I'm going to grab a scrap of felt here for this next one. Maybe I'll do a beige piece so it really shows up really well. Hold on. Here's a little piece. Let's cut a little piece off. So frequently you'll notice on my dolls that I just I use what I call a tacky stitch. Now if you do a seed stitch, it's little short, just single stitches like this, but they're done in a million different directions, not in a straight line or in any kind of pattern. I do a variation of that when I'm sewing down things like the blood drops on Mr. Bloodsucker, the eyeballs, and broken heart on mis-dead water. And I will come up in through the felt piece and then go down in a straight line to the fabric. Do it again. I'm going to take a little bit bigger stitch so you can see that better. So I'm going to come up through the felt and then straight across from that outside of the felt edge and into the fabric. And I'll do that all the way around. You can do them close together or not. That's totally up to you. You can do them in contrasting colors like I'm doing here or not. Again, totally up to you. I find this is an easy, quick, interesting, but not distracting way to attach your felt shapes to your dolls. If I don't want the stitches to detract from the shape, then I use the same color of thread as or similar to the shape. I tend to use a long, I can't remember the Japanese name. There's a Japanese name for the kind of sewing needle that I like. I got mine from Etsy. I will link them below. They have a similar style needle at Hobby Lobby in the sewing section. It's just a very long, sharp, point, large-eyed sewing needle if you go into the sewing department, but use what works for you, but you do want a sharp needle for this. Okay, we'll fix this first one that isn't quite right and come up into the felt and then go back over the old stitchy back through that hole. Nobody would ever know it's down there. You get an idea now? Okay, let's see. In the directions, I call this one a seat stitch over back stitch and this one a cross stitch over back stitch. They may have proper names. I don't know what they are. I also just do basic, simple cross stitches, but basic Xs. So come up into the fabric, then diagonally from the hole, go in, then come back out straight up from the hole where the thread's coming up and then back down over here to form a basic X. Should we do that again? So diagonally and then straight across and then back down like that. Sometimes I do this and I get myself into a spot where I haven't left myself enough thread to tie a knot. So I will split the strands of embroidery floss and then just use those to do this and tie a knot. If you're worried about some of your knots coming undone, it doesn't hurt to put a little dab of fray check or fabric tack on the knot and that will keep it secure. So that's that. I do have one more stitch I want to show you that I use occasionally and I did use it to do the ribs on misdead water as a bullion stitch. Thread our needle again. That's not threaded correctly. So you want a decent length of thread for this and to do the ribs here, the long ribs, this is what I did. So I did sort of a larger bullion stitch. So I came up from the back. I figured out where I wanted the other side of the rib to be went down and then have the needle come back up near where that threads coming up. Before you pull, don't pull. You want to wind enough loops around your needle to at least an equal distance to the space here of fabric between where the needle is going in and coming out. So wind it, push it down. Oops, it's actually a little easier to do when it's not on the embroidery hoop for me. Because again, I'm not used to working with a hoop too much. So keep winding and keep pushing down. The trick with for the ribs is I didn't want it too tight. So I didn't want to put too much on it and I'll show you what I mean. Okay, so that's about right. I probably could do a couple more, but we're not going to. I'm going to hold this while I push the needle through. It can be a little bit tight. So just hold all those loops. There we go. Pull straight up. If as you're pulling you lose track of it and it gets away from you, just fix the little loops. So there you go. Then pull it towards you and pull. Now if you just want a straight line of bullion loops, then you would pull it fairly taut. For what I was doing, I wanted to pull it taut, but not completely tight. So about there, I'm going to go back in over here on this side. Then I'm going to come in just down from where that loop of bullion stitches is and push my needle up this way and take one tacking stitch to pull that row of bullion stitches down and make it curved to do our ribs. And then to do the center part, I just did a really short bullion stitch. Now you may have a favorite stitch that you think will look better. That is just fine. So use that. But those are the basic stitches that I use when I make my dolls. I'm going to tie this off. So there you go. Now I'm just making sure I'm in frame. So now I'm going to take my list and this is I'm going to share this with you. So this is a list of my doll ideas. So as I think of another doll to make, I usually write the name down. There is one that's not on here. And then I use that name or term that I thought of to create a zombie doll, Mr. Deadwater, Mr. Bloodsucker. So we're going to do another one that actually isn't on here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut my pieces out. And for this doll, you're going to need just black and white felt, nothing else. You're going to need the basic doll pattern and some of the bones patterns. So I'm going to gather my stuff together and I'll be right back. I'm going to tell you why I made an arm pattern. I just was setting up for the next shot. So I made this arm pattern in case you want to make your art dolls and you want to say do the original art doll pattern for the mermaid and add arms to her separately. Or maybe you want to do this egg shape and add arms to them separately. Or maybe you want to do one of these other shapes. So you have the option of just doing one of these shapes and adding the arms separately or cutting out this mermaid and cutting her arms off. And then you have an arm separate arm that you can put on. So that's why I made an arm piece. Anyway, I'm going to set up and I'll be right back. So for that to make your doll, you're going to need to cut your pieces out. So if I'm working with a light colored fabric like this one, then I will just use a black ballpoint pen to trace my shape. If you're working with a darker fabric, you're going to need something that will show up obviously on the dark fabric. You can try one of your white paint pens. Gel pens don't work super well. This is a little piece of scrap piece of white Taylor's chalk. You could use sidewalk chalk. Use what you have and trace around your pattern. So you have your shape. When you cut it out, ideally cut all of the marks off. So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put a couple pins into the two. I have two layers of black felt here. So I want to hold all the layers together while I cut. So it doesn't fly around too much. Now take some fabric scissors, something nice and sharp. The scissors you've been using for mixed media are probably not sharp enough to do this. If they're like mine and all got all gummed up. So this is an idea for a zombie doll that I've had in the back of my mind without a name which is unusual for my zombie doll process because that's not what's typically happened for me. Usually I think of the name first as I'm saying that I'm thinking of a name. So I'm going to cut my doll out. Now these edges are going to show. So you want them to be fairly neat and even. So something's not quite right. Give it a trim. Okay, that looks pretty good. So I took a bunch of the littler pieces of zombie embellishments and I have them in here. Now this one is fairly new so I actually don't have him on chipboard yet. So we're going to just kind of use them as he is at the moment but I need to cut him out of chipboard and then I've got I'm going to need the bone and then we're going to need the ribs. Now this is the original rib that I glued to some chipboard. This is the back of a paper pad and it's okay. It kind of works. I do have one that's cut out though. Obviously it's not that one. Let's see. Oh, here it is. So I redid it on a piece of computer paper and then I cut it out with an X-Acto knife and I do think that works a little bit better. It's really the only piece because I think it's too small and kind of fiddly. So we're going to need those and I've got some white felt and we're going to cut out some bones. The question is do I want to cut out all these ribs? I know while I'm thinking about that we'll do the other ones because I don't know what I do with my pen. Maybe I did. Okay so just like with the other piece just trace around your pattern piece. Now when you have small fiddly pieces like this it might be harder to cut out. You might find you need smaller scissors. Maybe you need an X-Acto knife. Maybe you want to like I said with the ribs. Maybe you just want to embroider it. That works too. I do have smaller scissors up here. These are actually surgical scissors from the medical supply store which are my favorite needle working scissors. They're nice and sharp, sharp points. So like with the other pieces for the doll I'm going to cut it out and I'm going to try to cut all the pen marks off. So get all your pieces cut out for the doll that you want to make. Now sometimes for some of your dolls like Mr. TP Shortage I had to figure out how I was going to make little mini rolls of toilet paper and what I ended up doing was wrapping some paper towel around some brown craft paper rolling it up really tight and gluing it and letting it dry and then cutting it into little toilet paper roll shapes. It worked really well. Use what you have. Use what's around you. You don't probably have to go out and buy too much and if you do felt it's pretty cheap. So that's pretty look at that already. I didn't even have the eye holes cut yet. All right let's get the eye holes cut and then I'll cut the rest of the pieces off camera and we'll take it from there. Let's get these eye holes cut. So I'm going to just take a slice in the middle of each one just a little short stitches. I mean cuts. Now if you aren't or haven't ever made any dolls before felt or otherwise as a friend of mine recently said to me maybe make the pattern bigger instead of smaller. So print it at 200% piece it together and start with a larger doll because the larger pieces are easier to handle easier to cut out. Your doll will be easier to put together. That being said I will sometimes pre-cut a bunch of zombie doll pieces and just have them how cute is that? Just have them out so they're already pre-cut so I will cut a whole bunch of them out and have them pre-cut and then I'll just sit one day and just do a bunch of stitching. So you definitely can make the eye holes a little bigger a little more even. I think I want them a little bigger. Yeah that's bigger that's better. So I'm going to get the rest of my bones cut the same way and I will be right back. Okay before I show you a better picture of this. So the two that I thought of that I hadn't written down yet were Mr. Dead Treat and this guy I think his name is going to be Mr. Deathwish. I kind of like that name. So I got all the bones cut out. Now I used our bone template which is closer to this size to size down a couple of smaller bones for his arms. So again you know when you do print the pattern you can print the the doll and or the elements in different sizes and if you alter the size for a doll and you think you might want to use that again and again and again then create yourself a little pattern piece for the small ones I keep them in this little ziplock bag that I've punched a hole in and it lives on the same binder ring as the big pieces. All right so now we're going to get him stitched together and we're going to use where did I put my embroidery hoop somewhere. Okay we're going to use our little sort of seed stitch attaching method to attach the white bones to the black background using white embroidery floss. So I'm going to speed forward through that process and I'll be right back for one second with two thoughts that are just occurring to me. So number one I decided to put the little pieces of felt for the rib cage on. I use this now this is a fabric glue stick it is a temporary basting glue and I use it in other fabric slow stitching projects. It works really well for this it's a little difficult to get on the felt pieces but yeah they're sticking. So something like that comes in really handy this is from Sewline I'll try to again link it in the description below if I forget somebody remind me. Also you could very easily make this maybe you're not into the whole zombie doll thing maybe you want to make a series a day of the dead dolls. How cute would that be? You do this same basic doll and then add some brightly colored flowers and stitches to it how cute would that be? Anyway I'm going to finish getting my bones stitched on and I'll be right back. So I have all of my pieces attached like I showed you in this stitch here. I did only use three strands of the white embroidery floss rather than all six so I separated my strands out to have them be a little less thick. You could use regular sewing thread I find embroidery floss is a little nicer to use. If you're going to add more decorations to your doll it's good to do it before you assemble the doll it's easiest. That being said usually if I'm going to add seed beads I do it after the doll is stuffed. If you're going to go the route of adding seed beads to your dolls which you totally can do I would recommend doing some practicing first you do need one of these teeny tiny sewing needles can you even see that on camera it's like a strand of hair and some of this teeny tiny thread because you have to have a needle that'll go through the beads. I do use beads though on a lot of my dolls but you don't have to you can just do felting buttons. I do also want to point out that on Mr. Bloodsucker his bat wings which you totally can do out of felt but I didn't even make a pattern piece for that because how cute are these? These are wood wings from Mike Deakins laser cut set of Halloween shapes the same set that the skull came in that's on the coffin box and I just painted them to match. This is wool felt this is acrylic felt you don't have to have wool felt it's more expensive I do think it has a nicer feel to it than the acrylic I think it stitches a little easier than the acrylic but acrylic works fine acrylics cheap and if you don't have either of those you could make do with what you have but felt is usually the best choice of material for this and it comes in a lot of colors. I don't throw my scraps away and by scraps I mean these little tiny bits because I sometimes use them to stuff in my dolls so but that's just me you don't have to do that. All right so the next thing we're going to do is attach the two pieces together now I didn't show you before when we did our stitching samples how to do blanket stitch because I kind of wanted to show you when we were putting the doll together so we are going to do blanket stitch all the way around the doll to sew him together we're going to start I usually like to start and stop somewhere at the top of the head generally speaking so we're going to start probably right here and work our way around and I'm going to stop here and then we'll stuff the doll then we'll finish stitching him so I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that I need my black embroidery floss okay for this I will probably use all six strands of black floss because I think it's easier it's going to be hard enough for you to see on camera let me see maybe I should do a sample first where's that red floss I have lots of scraps of felt so let's see we can do it on these two pieces all right so thread your needle if you're like me put your readers on because that's important now if you don't care if the knot shows or not then it doesn't matter then you can just go straight in or straight up from the back if you don't want the knot to show then go up between the layers through the top layer of fabric I usually don't like at least that initial knot to show like that push the little tail under the thread down go back go around to the back come back up in or near where you just went in like this and make a loop then we're going to do it again and we're going to flip our thread around to the back we're going to come up in the back about a quarter an inch an eighth an inch away from that first stitch we're going to pull our thread before we pull it all the way we're going to put the needle into that loop and pull the first one's going to look messier like that don't pull it super tight just pull it taut do it again do it again what will happen is you'll get a row of stitches like this on the edge and you have this little thread on the end it just gives it a nice finishing touch when you get all the way back around and say you are all the way over here we're going to just pretend because we can do that right we're going to just pretend let's see you tie my thread okay so we're going to just pretend over here that we've been stitching we've been stitching so when you get back over to the end and you're going to meet your two threads and you're going to close it up run your needle underneath here underneath this loop the starting loop and underneath that starting diagonal like this and pull and what'll happen is look at that then you can't even tell and so then you would just tie it off and I would take my I would tie a knot and then I would like this and then I would take my needle and run it between the layers of felt out this way I would pull it taut and trim it and then it's all sealed up together right that's not the best neatest one that I've done but you get the idea I think so we're going to do that now on our doll we're going to grab a big piece of black thread here again all six strands I'm going to come up sort of like right here you want to go in about a quarter of an inch or an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the felt you don't want to pull too tightly because felt is a pretty open weave fabric and if you pull too tightly you might just pull the thread right through the fabric plus we're going to be stuffing this with polyfill and you don't want your stitches too tight you want to give it some ease so that you can get the stuffing in there I'm going to try to zoom in with my camera although I don't know how well you're going to be able to see this because we're working with black on black which is like the hardest two colors on the planet make sure you're working in nice bright light if you need to use a magnifying glass sometimes when I'm working with black on black that's important you could of course use dark gray or white around the edge but just do this all the way around the edge until you get back to about here and then we're going to be right back I'm going to get that done and I'll be right back okay so we are back to the head you will notice that I had to add thread here and I did tie it off and I left the tail on hanging out I had to do it again over here I just found that number one that's the easiest way to add thread when you run out when you're going around the outer edge and number two he is a zombie so some of the knots and thread ends I don't mind them showing and I do that kind of attaching on almost all my dolls here's the Mr. Bloodsucker you can see there okay so now we're gonna stuff him now I do sometimes stuff him the fabric scraps but for today I actually have actual polyfill and we're gonna put my glasses on and grab my little pusher stick I don't know what that actually is by the way I've said in videos before to my grandmother's button box I don't know what it originally was used for if y'all know leave it in the comments below I use it for stuffing the zombies when my fingers and hands aren't long enough so just take a small wad of polyfill and do the arms and legs first the extremities someone I just push that wad down into one of the legs and then I'll grab another one and sometimes they use that little pusher sometimes I don't so the reason you don't pull the blanket stitches too tight is because when you stuff it it pulls them tight and if they're already tight to begin with then it looks wonky when you stuff it so you want to pull them taut but not too tight and you could totally not do these as like a therapy thing like I started out that's a little bit too much polyfill um you could just do them as like maybe Halloween decorations maybe cute you could do cute ones not zombie ones and do them for your next arts and crafts fair that you're going to sell things at that's what I used to use the do with the little r dolls I used to sell them at christmas time I would make a bunch of the angel ones and I would decorate a tree in my booth with the little angel ones sell a lot of them so just make sure you get some stuffing down inside all of the extremities before you stuff the body see I haven't needed the pusher he's cute this is a cute one you totally could do a day of the dead one of these I might have to do another one of these at some point because I think that sounds cute to do a day of the dead one so you want to get enough stuffing in there that you know they're they're firmly stuffed you don't want them to be too flat if you're going to give these to little kids I would recommend not putting any beads or buttons on the outside do everything it's felt like this one so there's no little pieces that can be pulled off and swallowed that's about right so then we'll finish sewing up the head you could pin this or you could just hold it I usually just hold it the only thing I don't like about this doll is this is black on black like that color two colors I hate stitching with even though black is my favorite color just because that thread is so hard to see now when you get to this point if you decide you needed like a little bit more stuffing in the head you could still stuff some more in there before you stitch them up completely so we're almost back to that beginning part which again I doubt you're going to be able to see because he's black on black but here's the beginning stitches right here so I'm going to grab them and I'm going to pull because it's a less less cute knot than the other one now you can be done there but as you know because I shared already I like to name my dolls so I have this piece of muslin that I have attached to a piece of packing tape use a fine point sharpie marker which I can't find right now because why would I need it there it is and I write their name in sharpie on the piece of muslin leave a little bit of a space at the beginning and the end and then attach this to the back of the doll usually with just like a single stitch we'll do it just poke a hole in the fabric and tape with the needle which I'm usually better at than I am right now because I'm on camera because you know there we go let's see and then just tie you don't need to do anything fancy there's not going to be any stress on the tag do two or three times of tying and then trim and then do the other side which I got the first time which is a miracle mister death wish he's cute all right I'll be right back and barely get them all in the screen maybe if I move this one over here so this is the complete zombie doll family as it stands at the moment I will say a few things so first of all I was talking about making little toilet paper rolls for mr tp shortage so literally I just made a tube of brown craft paper and then wrapped some paper towel around it glued the whole thing with elmer's glue and then once the long tube of this was dry I just cut it up into little rolls of toilet paper they turned out so cute I decided to save the extra ones these have been a lot of fun to make they're definitely my way of working through things that are going on but they could they don't have to be for you they're just fun to make I mean little zombie dolls and with Halloween coming up how much fun are they I do have some stuff and some inspiration to do one that's definitely Halloween themed with maybe a head of a pumpkin I'm not sure exactly what his name is but something like mr dead treat I think it's going to be really cute and I've got like some of this kind of stuff I picked up the other day to like maybe be sticking out of his head and I found these multicolored skull beads that are probably used either on him or a future zombie and they came in two different sizes um yeah so these are a lot of fun to make now I will say yes the kit got me started in the idea but definitely I veered off and developed my own pattern I'm not a super huge fan despite how many of them I've made of doing ones with separate heads it is much easier and a lot more fun to do than one piece dolls I think than it is the ones with the separate heads that being said sometimes um because of the design like the one that I want to do with the pumpkin head you need to do one with a separate head my pattern is a bit different than hers and a little bit bigger than hers the shape of the body is different if you want to use her patterns she's got this one that's more of a square head and you definitely need to get a hold of this book in her kit she also has she doesn't have very many people so these are here's a picture of her zombies that she did and the author's name is it is a woman I believe it's by Paragon Inc Francis Pryor Reeves anyway um there is um a zombie octopus there's a zombie caterpillar which reminds me of that but what is that book the there's a kid's story book about a caterpillar they've made it into a zombie it looks like the same exact caterpillar a traffic cone which is funny there's a zombie kid again I was inspired by her patterns I didn't exactly use them way intended or I didn't use them at all change the shape change the size there's a zombie badge zombie cell phone a zombie venus fly trap there's a voodoo doll I mean you get the idea so um whether you use my pattern or hers or one of your own they're definitely a lot of fun to make I would appreciate you buying my pattern of course that would be great and if you make your own zombie dolls and you want to share do tag me in the post my friend Mike Deacon is doing his own version of the zombie doll and I will link you to his video in the description below he also has a lot of the things like the laser halloween laser cuts wood that you can use like for the bat wings or like I used on the top of the coffin box so those are all from his halloween laser cuts and a few other things in his shop that you can use they are a lot of fun to make and you you know you can make them as big or as small as you want definitely when you print it size it up or size it down the smaller you go the more challenging it is to sew just fyi all right that's it I hope that this gives you some ideas of things that you can do and ways to get into stitching if you're so interested and just give it a try these definitely if you're doing a halloween arts and crafts show these would be really cute in your booth but if you're doing a Christmas one I used to make tons of these at Christmas and I would fill a tree and I can definitely do a tutorial on doing these little felt dolls if you guys want leave something in the comments below and we can do a tutorial on doing these little felt dolls I did a lot of these back in the day and I would fill Christmas trees and I would sell almost all of them so anyway that's it for now don't forget to like share and subscribe leave any questions comments or concerns down below all relevant links should be in the video description if they're not let me know and I will fix it and stay safe stay healthy stay creative go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it if you can support the free content here on youtube and over in the facebook art groups I sure would appreciate it there is a link tree list of links in the video description and that's all the places you can find me on the etsy on the internet including the etsy shop patreon and all of that stuff so check it out anyway that's it for now I'll see you later bye guys