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The Story of the Miniature Stocking Caps: Part 3

A woman sits in a turquoise blue chair, her legs crossed, knitting a tiny stocking cap. At her feet are two balls of yarn.
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.

My regular followers will remember a story that I shared last summer about Evelyn, who hand-knitted a plethora of itty-bitty stocking caps before she passed away. I bought them at a church rummage sale, from a woman who seemed very disrespectful toward Evelyn.

I opened my online store last summer, and attempted to sell these very tiny handmade stocking caps in a way that would honor Evelyn’s hard work. When I say “very tiny,” this is what I mean:

A woman's hand is held up in front of a purple fabric background. On the tips of each of her fingers is a hand-knitted stocking cap. I will describe each stocking cap from left (on the thumb) to right (on the pinkie finger): far left is a black stocking cap with a white pom-pom on top and a folded, short cuff. Next is a green hand-knitted stocking cap with a cuff; next is a burgundy-colored stocking cap with a cuff; next is a navy blue stocking cap with a cuff and a pink pom-pom on top. On the pinky is a yellow hand-knitted stocking cap with cuff.
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.

To read the earlier blog posts about the origin of these stocking caps, please click here for Part 1 and click here for Part 2 of this story.

In brief, I don’t know what Evelyn intended for these little stocking caps, but I’m sure she had some kind of craft project in mind.

But from the beginning, I wanted to honor her memory by making sure these tiny, hand-knitted stocking caps went to people who would truly enjoy them. During the summer months, as I’ve said, I sold them in my newly-established online store.

The image shows a craft fair store with bags, bobs, bits, and T-shirts on display. The text says (at the top) "ChellyWood LLC" follwed by "sewing supplies," "handmade items," "and more." There's a sign hanging from a push pin that says "Open" as well.
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 had sold my own handmade items at craft fairs in the past, but I’d never tried to run an online store before. It was tricky to learn how to make the price of these little stocking caps fair to the buyer, but at the same time cover the cost of my mailers, postage, and the time it took to get to and from the post office.

(I live in a rural part of Idaho, so getting to the post office, in and of itself, is quite an ordeal sometimes.)

At first I tried selling them for $1.99 each, but no one purchased them. I offered four hats for $4.99 for a while, and I sold a bunch of them at that price. But after paying the shipping on them, plus the cost of the mailers, I realized I was not only NOT making a profit, but I was actually paying my customers to take them off my hands!

Good golly!

The image shows the ChellyWood doll with a humorous face. Her tongue is sticking out, and she wears a huge smile. There's a dialog bubble above her head that says L O L with an exclamation point.
Visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

So I took them out of my store (you can go broke fast, if you’re paying other people to take them), and did quite a bit of research to come up with a fair way to sell them. I have currently set the shipping/handling fee at $7.99 because that’s the average of what it cost me to ship those packages that I mailed to my buyers over the summer months.

I’ve tried the little hand-knitted stocking caps on various dolls. Most of them are designed to fit very small dolls, as you can see here:

On the left, a Topper Dawn doll wears a green bolero jacket with matching long green dress and a green hand knitted stocking cap that has a tiny pom-pom on top. Beside her to the center of the image, a Chelsea doll wears a yellow felt jacket, pink pants, yellow plastic shoes, and a tiny yellow knitted stocking cap that has a folded brim. On the far right, a vintage Skipper doll models a handmade long white dress with red ribbon trim, under a sky blue winter coat that's quite long. She wears a sky blue knitted stocking cap without a folded brim.

They are not big enough to fit on an average Barbie, but they do fit nicely on vintage Skipper, modern Chelsea (both shown above), and dollhouse-sized dolls.

For very tiny dolls like Topper Dawn, Pippa, Chelsea and the like, they look fine with a rolled cuff, as you can see in the image below, but for bigger dolls like vintage Skipper, I couldn’t get them to fit with a rolled brim.

A Topper Dawn doll wears a long dress made of green floral fabric. She also wears a matching green stocking cap that has a rolled-back cuff.There are also a smattering of bigger winter hats, that seem to be made of strings of yarn, all wrapped around a plastic ring, and then tied in a way that forms a stringy pom-pom on top.

These will fit Barbie and similar-sized dolls, but they were probably much easier to make, and therefore not worth as much money.

Here’s what they look like:

A black Barbie with silver hoop earrings models a stringy-style stocking cap which uses the strings of pink and blue yarn to form a stocking cap around some sort of plastic ring. At the top of the "stocking cap" is a pom-pom of the pink and blue strings.
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.

Over the summer, I estimated that Evelyn had made about a hundred hats, but I’ve since done a complete inventory and categorized the hats into various sets. There were actually 161 hats in total, not including the dozen or so that I sold last summer (at a cost to me, not a profit), and only three of them are the stringy kind that will fit Barbie.

After spending a whole weekend doing calculations that would include shipping and handling fees, I’ve divided these tiny stocking caps into six categories, and I’ve started to upload them to my store at a price that’s competitive with the cost of similar hand-knitted stocking caps on Etsy, plus my fee of $7.99 for shipping and handling.

A vintage Skipper doll models a red stocking cap with a tiny white pom-pom on top. It fits on her head, but it doesn't have a cuff folded at the bottom of the stocking cap.

These are the categories I came up with:

  • Christmas colors of red and green (1 set of 12 stocking caps for $10 per set)
  • Pastel colored stocking caps (I have 4 sets of 10 stocking caps for $9 per set)
  • Winter-coat-colored stocking caps (I have 4 sets of 12 stocking caps for $10 per set)
  • Multicolored mix of stocking caps (I have 4 sets of 12 stocking caps for $10 per set)
  • Multicolored mix of stocking caps small set (I have 2 sets of 6 stocking caps for $8 per set)

Currently I have only posted the Christmas colors and the pastel set in my store, but if you keep an eye on my store, I hope to upload the other three sets this weekend. (We’ll see if I have time…)

I expect the Christmas colors to go first, and there’s only one set of those. So if you’re reading this blog post early Friday morning, and you have a moderate interest in buying the Christmas colors, I recommend purchasing them quickly because they will likely get sold right off the bat.

A vintage Skipper doll from the 1960's wears a long white dress under a blue winter coat, and a red stocking cap with a tiny white pom pom on the end. Beside her, a Mattel Chelsea doll models a green skirt under her red coat, with a green knitted stocking cap that has a folded lip along the edge and a tiny red pom pom on top. To the left of these dolls, a Dawn doll wears a long green dress with a bolero jacket, and a knitted green stocking cap that doesn' have a pom pom, but it does fold up to form a lip around the edge of the stocking cap. These dolls and their clothing items are not for sale in Chelly's store, but the stocking caps in Christmas colors are for sale right now for a limited time.

 

The last set that I plan to upload is sort of a set of “leftovers.” Evelyn must have been a big fan of sunflower yellow and mauve, because this last set has a lot of yellow and mauve hats in it. I’m going to toss in the three Barbie-sized stocking caps with this mix of “leftover” stocking caps, along with a traditional red and white Christmas stocking cap.

I don’t know if this set of 25 stocking caps will be hard to sell or quick to sell, but my asking price will be $15 for all 25 of these. So I think it’s probably quite a steal, if you don’t mind having multiples of the same color.

On the left, we see two rows of pink stocking caps. Four of these are mauve and six are lavender-ish pink. then we see a row of 5 sunflower yellow stocking cap. Then three more sunflower yellow stocking caps. Next we have a red stocking cap with a tiny white pom-pom. there are two Barbie pink stocking caps and one light blue stocking cap with a tiny white pom-pom on top. Three of the hats shown on the upper left section of the screen are slightly bigger, and they are made of plastic rings with strings wrapped around them and tied in a stringy pom-pom on top. These larger "stocking caps" come in a.) Christmas red, green and white; winter pink and blue; and a pastel mix of pale blue, white, pink, and green.

This set of 25 will likely be the last set that I upload to my store, just because it’s the most unpredictable. And frankly, if I don’t get it uploaded in time for Christmas crafting, these colors will also be fun for Easter crafting.

If you’re wondering how big these hats are, I’ve got a measurement photo below to help you decide whether or not these hats will suit the projects you have in mind for your dolls:

The image shows an elongated pink, hand-knitted stocking cap. It's resting on a blue grid with two rulers, one showing imperial measurements and the other showing metric. With the hat extended (no brim fold), it appears to be 5 cm or 1 and 3/4 inches long.

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Have you been browsing through my doll clothes patterns, but wishing a certain pattern was slightly different? If so, my Creative Spark class, “How to Alter Doll Clothes Patterns” may be just what you need to make these patterns into the pattern you see in your mind’s eye.

I also have a class called “Design Your Own Doll Pants Patterns from Scratch.” In this class, which costs only $19.99, you will learn how to create your own pants patterns, including leggings, fly-front jeans, elastic-waist pants, and overalls.

With any class on Creative Spark, you don’t have to follow a schedule. Just sign up when you’re ready.

It’s a one-time fee for the course, and there’s no specific time limit to finish your course. You can just take your time and learn at the pace that suits you. So go check out my paid courses on Creative Spark, using this link!

In this image, we see a smattering of tools that will be needed to take the Creative Spark course on doll clothes pattern alterations with Chelly Wood. The items include the following: a doll, a ruler with metric and imperial measurements, a pencil with an eraser, graph paper, patterns that don't quite fit your doll, fabric, craft felt, ribbons, elastic, and post-it notes or scratch paper.
Visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

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To honor the trademark rights of the doll companies mentioned in this blog post, I am including links to their websites here. Please feel free to visit their website and consider purchasing one or more of the dolls mentioned.

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