Dress Up Doll

A similar idea to my mix and match card game, I decided to make a card doll with clothing on tabs to dress up. I drew a girl wearing a basic tshirt and shorts and used tracing paper to design clothes that would fit over the top.

I made small holes to slot the tabs through in her hair, shoulders, and waist, so I had to make sure the tabs on my clothes lined up with these too.

Like my mix and match cards, I wanted a combination of fancy dress outfits and regular clothing to create a bigger variety of games a child could play with it.

Once I had drawn all the clothes I painted them all, and then scanned the sheets of paper. Using photoshop I arranged the girl and all the clothes over two A4 pages, making sure I kept matching items together.

Because I have split the clothes over two pages, it would be interesting to see how themed pages would look. Aside from the basic set you get with the character I could do various pages with different themes, such as "Animals", "Nature", "Weather", "Party Wear" amongst other things. I can fit 3-4 outfits onto a page depending on what kind of items of clothing they are, and that should be enough for each theme, however I could expand this to two pages if I had more ideas for a particular theme.

I could link the style of these with the other experiments I have been doing by adding a dotted line around the edges of each piece, however they are a little fiddly to cut out around the edges so I want to find a way of being able to remove them easily. 

I could make the edges perforated, however this is incredibly time consuming and fiddly unless I had it done professionally, or I could make the clothes into stickers. You can buy sheets of sticker paper that will go through the printer from websites like http://www.craftycomputerpaper.co.uk/, and then cut around the edges of your design. These stickers would be easy to package, as i could put them into cellophane parcels with card stapled to the top to seal it with my contact details on top. This would also give me a chance to mix and match the types of outfits that go together. I could have some parcels that have a theme, and others that are more of a "lucky dip" where you would get a random mix of outfits.

The only big problem I could see with making these dolls as stickers is that it is quite hard to make the stickers reusable. Although stickers will peel off the doll if I have printed it on appropriate paper, stickers tend to curl up and either stick to themselves or lose their stickiness completely. 

I think the best thing to do is try out both and see which works best, although at the moment I think that cutting out the card myself and packaging them in a similar way to how I would package stickers is the best way to produce them.

This is another item that I can continuously expand and add to, as there is no limit on the amount of outfits I can produce for them.