For the last few years I've been making little tomten
Originally I sewed the clothes by hand. But this year I happened to have my sewing machine out on the table for another Christmas project (a surprise!) and decided to whip up a half dozen outfits, assembly line style.
The patterns are really simple. The shirt is a fat plus sign with the sleeve parts being slightly longer. You just fold it in half, sew the sides (leave the bottom open!) and cut a tiny hole for the neck. Make sure it's a tiny hole because the neck is only made of pipe cleaner and you don't want to see too much of that. Cut out a half circle to make a cone for their pointy hats. The pants you just fold in from the side, sewing up the legs and then the back. A great book for more details on all of this is Felt Wee Folk.
The bodies I made out of two pipe cleaners. Fold the top one in half, and then fold in little arms with a bit overlapping to form part of the body and attach the legs to. You can wrap the ends with embroidery floss to give them more of a finished look and to create little mittens and boots. Do this before you twist them all together.
The legs are made by shaping a W, wrapping and shaping the feet and then twisting the bottom pipe cleaner onto the top one. They're not going to look very pretty at this point, but not to worry, you're going to be covering them in cute felt outfits!
You can stitch their pants and shirts together if you like, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, depending on how snugly they fit. You can see the difference between the wrapped (left two) and unwrapped (right two) hands and feet below. The heads are just wooden beads glued onto the pipe cleaner neck with regular tacky glue.
For fun, and if you haven't run out of steam yet, you can embellish their clothes with embroidery floss, beads, bells etc. And then the last step is putting on their hair and beards; this is my favorite part! Sometimes I draw little faces on them too.
I use raw, straight from the sheep, wool. It looks the most like an elf beard, I think. I try to take advantage of the natural curls and twists when making mustaches and braids and whatnot.
You can give them all sorts of personality with the hair, embellishments and faces. Sometimes I stuff the clothes a little to make them chubby. Sometimes I give them long ZZ Top beards or braids for the girls. It's a fun activity to do every year and I'm already looking forward to when our kids can start contributing to the collection. I'm anticipating a house chock full of merry Christmas elves!
