Old Patterns from Chelly's Collection, Uncategorized

How to Unbraid a Doll’s Braided Hair

There are two photos displayed within a purple background frame. The photo on the left shows an Anna doll from Disney's Frozen. This doll is shown from the front view. Her braids come up from her ears and tie together over the top of her head, with hair flying wildly behind her. There's a spool of pink thread beside the doll to indicate that she's only about six inches for 15.5 cm tall (triple the height of the spool of thread, and then a bit more). Her legs are made of yellow plastic and she wears a thin yellow nightgown, which looks like the pajama she wore in the Disney film. The photo on the right shows the same doll in profile. A woman's hand holds her aloft. The braids atop her head are very tiny and closely braided together. From this angle the state of the rest of her hair is clear. She has wild curls flying everywhere, matted and twisted together in a mass of red hair. Clearly a child has played with this doll a lot!
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

I found this little wild child at my local Goodwill store, and bought her for $2.50 American. As you can see in the images above, she had clearly been played with a lot and generally loved by a child.

The biggest challenge with cleaning this doll was her hair. Those tiny braids! But I have found a way to unbraid a doll’s braided hair that seems to work pretty well.

Here we see a horizontally aligned image consisting of two photos. The first photo in the upper left shows a Disney Princess Anna Toddler doll with two tiny braids extending above her head. The two braids have been pulled together and somehow tied together with unbraided hair extending below where the braids come together. The text beside this image says, "braided." Then, in the lower right corner, we see a photo of the same doll. The braids have been separated and the braid on the left side of her head is still braided while the braid on the right of her head has been successfully unraveled. The unraveled braid has some curl to it, from having been in a braid for a very long time. The text beside this image says, "unbraided."
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

The reason I wanted to unbraid the hair, is so that I could give the doll’s hair a proper wash. When children play with a doll a lot — and you can see this little lady was some child’s favorite toy to play with — they get tossed about from the sandlot to the kitchen table.

That means there can be food, soil, and who-knows-what in the strands of hair.

So how to unbraid the hair? Well, to start with, the two braids were actually sewn together with a little auburn-colored piece of embroidery floss. That had to be removed first.

This is a very closely magnified image of a strand of hair from the Disney's Frozen Anna doll -- a small doll standing only 6 inches or 15 cm tall. In this detailed photo, we can see that the strand of hair had been wrapped in a piece of string or embroidery floss that exactly matched the color of Anna's hair, camouflaging the string within the strands of hair. The chellywood.com logo appears in the upper right corner of this photo.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

It was tricky getting that thing out of the hair. It was so tiny, I had to use a magnifying glass to see it while I worked!

And what tool did I use for that? Well, I’m a seamstress, so I used a seam-ripper (unpicker), of course!

Then I had to carefully unravel each braid. Again, I chose a tool that’s familiar to most sewists: a hand-stitching needle.

This is a photo of the palm of a woman's hand. In the middle of the palm of the hand rests a needle. It has an extra wide eye, as if it were going to be used for yarn, embroidery, ribbon, or string -related crafts. The tip of the needle is blunt. This is a woman's left hand, and on her ring finger, there is a silver ring with no specific design other than being a band. The chellywood.com logo appears in the lower right corner of the image, where we see a grid behind the woman's hand, as if she has been working on a cutting mat.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Sorry my hands looks so scaly in these photos. I get scaly hands whenever Covid makes its rounds at the school where I work. There’s actually a condition called “Covid hands,” and I seem to get this condition instead of the usual upper-respiratory issue.

Although this blog post is appearing in August, I did my restoration for Anna back in December of last year, when Covid was going around. So please excuse the ugly nature of the images; there wasn’t much I could do about it!

It’s not just dry skin. It’s Covid!

Here we see a very close-up image of the head of the Anna Toddler doll from Disney's Frozen. Her tiny braid sticks out from the right side of her head. A woman's thumb and index finger hold a blunt-tipped needle which has been passed through the folds of the braided ginger-red doll hair. On the left side of the needle shaft, the braid has separated; on the right side of the needle's shaft, the braid is still in tact. The Chelly Wood dot com logo appears in the lower right corner of the photo.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Anyhow, I inserted the needle between the strands of hair within the braid, and then slowly pulled the needle toward the ends of the hair.

Here’s the result:

Here we see a horizontally aligned image consisting of two photos. The first photo in the upper left shows a Disney Princess Anna Toddler doll with two tiny braids extending above her head. The two braids have been pulled together and somehow tied together with unbraided hair extending below where the braids come together. The text beside this image says, "braided." Then, in the lower right corner, we see a photo of the same doll. The braids have been separated and the braid on the left side of her head is still braided while the braid on the right of her head has been successfully unraveled. The unraveled braid has some curl to it, from having been in a braid for a very long time. The text beside this image says, "unbraided."
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

As you can see, Anna has a lot more curl in the unbraided hair strands than she has in the rest of the hair.

This curliness does change a bit after washing, although I think you would need to use an electric hair-straightening iron, to really get it straight.

In the background of this photo, a bottle of Dawn dish detergent rests on a cutting mat. In the foreground, a woman's hand holds the twisted ginger-red hair of a Disney Frozen Anna doll that is nude. The hair is still a bit wet, but by twisting the hair in this way, the woman is able to wring the water out of the doll's hair. The chellywood.com logo appears in the lower right corner of the photo.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

As I’ve told you in previous blog posts, I use Dawn dish detergent to shampoo the doll’s hair. It cuts through grease, which is why it’s used by conservation groups to clean animals’ fur and birds’ feathers after oil spills.

Recently I tried using All liquid laundry fabric softener to condition my dolls’ hair. I’m not very happy with the outcome from this product.

It was cheap. I guess, as the saying goes, “You get what you pay for.”

You may recall the Belle doll’s hair looking pretty wild, even after a shampoo and conditioning… That was the result of using All fabric softener:

This is a horizonal image with five photographs. The first photo (on the far left) shows a Beauty and the Beast doll from Hasbro (2016) with her "repaired" hair viewable from the right side of her face. This hair looks a bit tangled with a sort of split-ends look to the bottom of the hair. the next two images show the doll's left side from different angles, and the hair sweeps back nicely from the face into wide tendrils of auburn-to-chestnut colored hair. Next we see the hair from the back. It's thick, but very matted. And finally, we see the doll from the front. Although he hair is quite thick and a little bushy, she looks generally attractive.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

In the past, I have used Downy fabric softener for my go-to hair conditioner, and I was much happier with the results. But I’m going to continue this blog post with the before-and-after photos of Anna, tomorrow.

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Chelly Wood and the ChellyWood.com website are not affiliated with any of the doll or toy companies mentioned in this blog post, but Chelly enjoys designing her doll clothes to fit a variety of dolls. To learn more about the doll companies mentioned in today’s post, please visit the doll or toy company’s website.

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