Sew a Mermaid Doll with the Coolest Yarn Hair!
I’m so excited to introduce the Persephone Mermaid Doll sewing pattern! This doll has been in the works for awhile, mostly because I wanted to create a rag doll with yarn hair that can be styled down or in multiple ways, after the success of my first yarn doll hair video tutorial.
How to Make Yarn Hair for Rag Dolls || A Video Tutorial
Yarn hair is something that is super easy, but can leave you wondering how it’s done until you see it in action. Persephone has the coolest yarn hair! There’s so much of it and it’s impossible not to play with. I created a video tutorial for this hair style so that you can learn how it’s done. I promise it’s so much easier than you think!
Here’s the video for Persephone’s yarn hair:
The Best Yarns for Doll Hair
I experimented with a few different types of yarn when creating the Persephone pattern and had some interesting findings!
Up until now, for the Ruby and Clara dolls, I had only used worsted weighted yarn, which I still find works great. For my first mermaid, though, I used some wool alpaca yarn that I bought at a Celtic fair from a local artisan. It’s hand dyed and absolutely gorgeous. I LOVED working with this wool yarn! It styles well, it’s lightweight and so, so fun to play with. It will also last longer than worsted and will look nice forever. In fact, the more I played with it, the better it became.
An added bonus to using this kind of yarn is that it’s not already wound into a skein, so I could skip a step in the yarn hair making process since I didn’t have to wind the yarn around cardboard to get certain lengths, so that was nice.
For the second doll, I used a cotton yarn because I thought the “layer cake” style of yarn would make fun layered wefts of different colored hair on my doll. It does look cool, but it’s very heavy! It almost weighs her head down at the neck and it’s just not as easy to play with and style. It worked fine, but it’s not ideal and I will stay away from cotton in the future.
It was back to the wool for the third doll! I got another wool yarn from a local shop and this hand dyed purple hair (with sparkles!) is the softest hair I’ve made. So for future dolls, I will be using wool, but if you find it a little pricey or can’t find it, regular worsted weight yarn works great and is a great option too.
You can purchase the Persephone Mermaid Doll pattern now in my shop or here on Etsy if you prefer! The printable PDF pattern includes all the pattern pieces, plus step by step instructions with photos. And if you need even more help, there is an entire rag doll sewing playlist on my YouTube channel for how to complete each of the different doll elements, such as the embroidered faces, the hair, moveable arms for the ballerina doll, and more.
I hope you enjoy this pattern as much as I loved making it! Making cute dolls is by far the best part of my job ;) You can shop my entire collection of doll patterns here.
Happy sewing!
Nikki
