How to make doll's hair for a knitted doll

I have nearly finished the Severus Snape doll, and have just spent a pleasant morning making his hair.

To make doll hair for a knitted doll, you need to cut lengths of yarn that are twice as long as you want the finished hair to be, plus maybe an inch and a half more, to allow for the knot and a final trim - it's always better to make hair too long, so you can trim to the exact style you want, rather than hair too short, which doesn't look right.

Insert a crochet hook into the doll's head where you would like a strand of hair to be.

Fold one of your strands of yarn in half and put it on the crochet hook...

...then pull a loop through.


Take the two ends of the yarn and pull them through the loop you have just created...

Then pull gently to create a firm knot. Voila - your first two strands of hair. Repeat all over the doll's head. This method gives you great control over your doll's hairstyle! Try using a mixture of different yarns and different thickness.


And here is the finished result, enjoying a cup of tea with Lucius Malfoy - you can buy both dolls and patterns in my Etsy shop.

Victorian hairwork

One project that I am hoping to help get off the ground this year is Transition Town Worthing's Re-Skilling group, which will be offering training in many of the skills and crafts that our grandparents took for granted. I don't think that Victorian hairwork will be on the agenda.

To us, the idea of preserving a departed relative's hair in the form of a bracelet, necklace, or hair ornament for prosperity seems macabre in the extreme. The Victorians had a deeply ritualised and sentimental view of death and the grieving process, with different modes of dress, length of mourning, and expected codes of behaviour following a death all clearly set out, depending on your social class. To a Victorian lady undertaking a lengthy period of mourning, maybe creating such a hairwork memento mori would have been a soothing way to fill the hours and reflect on the loss of a loved one.

Ambitious hairwork pieces would have been undertaken by professionals: a large embroidery of a weeping willow using the hair of both living and deceased family members to depict the tree and a grieving family standing beneath the branches.

Instructions for simpler pieces, including woven hairwork bracelets, or tubular head dresses, could be found in illustrated magazines and were made by more accomplished lady crafters at home.

Hairwork wasn't only used at times of mourning - it was seen as quite acceptable to use your own hair to make jewellery or love tokens to give to family and friends as a token of affection. I would like to see the look on someone's face if I did the same thing today...

The illustration above is of a large ribbon brooch made out of tubes of woven hair, with a hand painted brooch in the middle.