Painting Peg Dolls

Recently, a friend of mine came across this blog Catholic Icing that talked about the authors involvement with a Saint Peg Doll Exchange. She thought this was an amazing idea and, since there are ton of us crafty Catholic women about, quickly put out the feelers to people in our city.

Our group was ecstatic and quickly grew into a size of 32. Being a lover of spreadsheets, I put my sister to the task of creating a way for people to sign up with the saint they wanted to paint with googledocs.

I chose Saint Teresa of Andes and am basing my peg doll off of the following picture from Shower of Roses blog.

One benefit to having such a large group is that we ordered the peg dolls in bulk from this website and once we divided them up the cost only came to about $20 per person.

We've set the date for March 22nd as our exchange and promptly began to paint!

Here's where the fun starts!

Hmm...I wonder if I can redefine the word "fun" after taking several hours painting the heads of the peg dolls flesh colored, which I had to buy because I realized of all the colors of paint I owned, brown was not one of them...

My next layer was the habit...

After that I did the bottom layer of dark brown. One thing that I'm loving about doing the pegs is that they take a limited amount of talent to do. Because we're doing so many of the same design, they can be perfected along the way and most of the time I'm just filling in large portions which doesn't call for a lot of accuracy.

I then added the top coat which is a lighter brown color.

The picture that I'm using as a guide shows the top of the cloak/wrap with a gold trim but I already had a silver color so I substituted. I doubt anyone is going to really complain.

The next step was the add the black color to the habit.

 After that came the worst part of this entire project...the eyes! Ugh! These were horrible for me and several of my peg dolls ended up with reconstructive facial surgery where I had to repaint the skin color and try again.

Finally, all that was left was to draw a cross and flowers. I decided I wanted the cross on the bottom of the peg doll instead of in her arms and made the flowers surround it.

I'm super excited for the peg doll exchange (which isn't for a month) and even more excited for the next project that I have lined up!