Christmas Presents

Link and Zelda dolls I made for my brother and his wife, both big Zelda fans.

This year I made every Christmas present I gave, a feat I’ve attempted for years but never accomplished.  That’s partly because this year I decided not to try to make clothes.  Handmade clothes can fit, or they can be a surprise, never both: so they haven’t really worked out as presents.  (In my family, the secrecy of Christmas presents is absolutely sacred.)

Instead, I made toys!  Everyone got a different style.  I’ve made a couple of stuffed animals before, but they didn’t come out that well.  But practice is making perfect, and I feel like the presents came out well this time.  It was so fun, and so practical (not needing any fittings etc.) that I’m thinking of opening an etsy shop and selling dolls.  What do you think?

This is Akihiko, a character from a video game called Persona 3, which my niece loves. His head is made of papier-mâché and painted with acrylics. It took me as long to make the head as the rest of him put together, and it still doesn’t look that great, although better than the initial attempts at a cloth head.

My brother-in-law loves Back to the Future and Doc Brown specifically, and he is a puppetteer. So I made this hand puppet of Doc Brown as he appears at the end of the first movie, my favorite outfit of his. The hair is made of batting, the glasses of silver paper from a craft store, the transparent tie I cut out of a duvet cover. I drew the kanji on his shirt with a sharpie–figuring the text on his real shirt was probably nonsense, I just wrote some characters that look nice to me.

I had no idea what to make my brother until three days before Christmas, when I suddenly remembered the computer game we’d played as children, The Secret of Monkey Island, and its main character, Guybrush Threepwood. As I was about to start cutting the felt, I remembered that voodoo dolls were an important part of the sequel, and the whole thing came together almost instantly.

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