How to make Historical Clothing for Dolls: Stonehenge Fashion

As we go through our Mystery of History studies, I will be making historical clothing for the girls’ dolls as and when I have time. The girls still enjoy playing with their dolls, especially dressing and undressing them 🙂 I couldn’t find a male doll so I massacred one of the girl dolls which now looks neither male nor female. One’s imagination must be applied!

Before Christmas I made some Stonehenge Fashion:

To make these historically accurate (!) dolls clothes you will need a cheap shammy cloth, some fake fur, brown paper, twigs and hessian thread. My inspiration for these came from a brilliant book called Archer, Journey to Stonehenge:

The author has done so much research and the illustrations offer as much learning material as the writing.

Stonehenge Fashion: The Boy Doll

Here is the male (yes, really it is the male – imagination, remember?):

The loin cloth was made from two triangles cut out of the shammy. I used the hessian thread to join them together, adding a bag made out of masking tape, taped on itself and coloured with a brown crayon. I added patterns using a sharpie. The book explains that the patterns and colours on clothes tell a story. These zigzags represent the mountains and also ‘speak of good times and bad, of births and deaths, the pattern of life’ (Archer, Journey to Stonehenge):

Next I wound some masking tape around the arm as protection for his arm when shooting arrows, and some folded brown paper attached using tape on one upper arm as jewellery:

I made the bow and arrows from twigs outside and some hessian thread. Using some masking tape, I created arrows and stuck them on the twigs. Then I fashioned an arrow holder from masking tape and hessian thread:

This was easily attachable to the doll’s side using the thread:

The shoes were simple scraps of brown paper tied on using hessian thread – these mimicked the shoes made from hide and string:

Stonehenge Fashion: The Girl Doll

Here is the girl doll:

The dress was the made with a shammy and decorated in a similar way to the boy’s loin cloth using Sharpie pens. I cut the bottom to make tassels and added a fur belt:

I did her hair in the way shown in the book, with a twist at the top, held in place with a twig, and two plaits down the side, held in place with some thread: