Both little Bear and I love the book of Julia Donaldson, the "Paper Dolls". Actually we love all her books and this one is no exception. If you know "The Gruffalo" or "Zog" written by the same author, this book has another illustrator, which gives a very different feeling to it straight away.
The book is about a little girl with tiger slippers and a butterfly hairclip, who cuts out a string of five paper dolls with her mum. The dolls sing and dance around and come to life in the imagination of the little girl. The book is also about loss, giving an opportunity and a nice way of talking about loss with young children: It tells the story how you can keep in your memory dear people or favourite things you lose, your memory is being a "magical garden", a place you can visit again and again.
The book is also about passing on activities, habits through generations - just like cutting paper dolls with your child, the same way your mum did it with you.
The idea of making paper dolls is clearly coming from this book and it was not even our first time. Little bear has made them before, as a gift for friends he met for a playdate.
Little Bear's paper dolls were not only inspired, but also heavily influenced by the book. Not just how they look, but he gave names for his dolls as well. Similarly to "Ticky and Tacky and Jackie the Back and Jim with the two noses and Jo with the bow" in the book, he gave funny, revealing names to them - which was also part of the fun in the making. Some of the names he gave are "Disco-light head Julie", "Long arm Daniel" and "short hand Shara" - the last one inspired by the fact that my paper folding was not completely perfect and the last fold became narrower and the doll's arm shorter...
So, how we did the paper doll chain?
First we took a white A4 sheet paper. If you want larger dolls or longer chain, need a longer piece of paper, you can use wrapping paper for example.
Accordion fold the paper, making as many separate and equal parts, as many dolls you wish to have at the end.
Draw the design on the top fold. We used a basic doll shape. For the head we left quite a large circle, because it is the space for drawing the head as well as the hair of the dolls. We made a long dress shape for the dolls and later tailored some of them individually.
We cut out the doll whilst the paper was still folded. Afterwards we made the tailoring I mentioned eralier, unfolding the paper and cutting two of the dolls as boys with trousers and shorts. One doll's head was also adjusted, narrower head for a straight long hair - as a request of little Bear. This doll also looks backwards, just like in the original book.
With the folding, drawing and cutting, younger Bears will need the parents' help, but afterwards the decoration is really where their phantasy can create magic!
