Skull and Crossbones Matryoshka

Skull and Crossbones Matryoshka, a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

I’ve been working a lot lately, followed up by getting kind of sick (probably because of working so much), and so I haven’t had the time or energy to work on a lot of crafting lately. I did a bit of sewing on my curio quilt, but not enough to make a status update. (I’ve sewn half the beige sashing onto 14 of the 42 four-patches. I haven’t even pressed them yet.) Today I took a sick day from work, to try to catch up on sleep a bit, but I’ve got such a bad sinus cold that sleeping is proving very difficult. (Hard to sleep when you can’t breathe.) But in-between bouts of sleeping or attempting to sleep, I cut out and stitched together this matryoshka doll.

I have hopes of making one of these dolls for each of my family members by Christmas this year. The ones for my family will be a lot more traditional, with birds or flowers on the bellies of the ornaments for my female family members and little ties for each of the men. (I do know there are actual matryoshka dolls with men on them, but I haven’t been able to find enough pictures of them to get an idea of what’s traditionally painted on them. So many of the photos I’ve found have been of Russian political figures or popes/priests.)

So this doll was both a test run (since I’m not too familiar with felt as a material and since I’m always in need of practise with my embroidery) and a bit of a joke. In one of my Talk to Me Tuesday videos (which I may not have posted here), I talked about having bought all this beautiful felt to make these dolls, but having forgotten to buy any the colour of hair. (Nothing black, brown, yellow, gold, etc.) One of the people who commented suggested that I make a punk doll, with pink hair, since I hadn’t remembered “normal” hair colours. This is my version of that.

I probably should have given her spiked hair, though that wouldn’t have fit under her veil really, but instead she got purple hair with lighter purple “streaks” and an apron with a skull and cross-bones on it. I drew out the skull and cross-bones freehand on paper while looking at photos on Google, but I wound up stitching it freehand as well because it’s so awkward trying to draw patterns on felt. It came out a little bit wonky, and sort of looks like an alien skull rather than a human one, but I sort of like it anyway.

Anyway, it took me far too long, but I think I’ll go ahead with making these for my family. It’ll probably speed up when I’m not feeling so horrible and am a little more capable of focussing on what I’m doing.

Interested in making your own Matryoshka dolls? Here is the tutorial I used, from My Sparkle, which is a blog with several interesting tutorials.