Did you play with paper dolls when you were a kid? I did — but nearly as much as my girls do now. They LOVE paper dolls. We’ve used historical paper dolls to enhance our history lessons and to make stories come alive through play. They can be so much fun!
But they can also be a bit of a pain. Spending all that time (and even money!) buying, printing, colouring, and cutting out paper dolls only to have them rip. Or fussing with those tabs that supposed to hold the clothes on. If only paper dolls could be more durable!
Well, they can! Using a laminator and some velcro, you can make your children’s paper dolls much longer lasting AND help their clothes stay put. Here’s how we did it.
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You Will Need:
- Paper dolls, either premade or printable. There are lots of free printable paper dolls out there as well as some excellent selections available for purchase. We used these ones from Triumphant Learning and printed them on cardstock for durability. My kids are going to go wild when they see the Literary Characters add on, but for now, I’m saving them until the excitement of the base set wears off.
- Scissors
- Laminating pouches
- Thermal laminator
- Velcro (hook & loop) adhesive dots. I found mine at Dollarama.
Directions:
- If you’re using black & white, colourable paper dolls, do that now, then cut or punch them out. Go ahead and cut off those little paper tabs as you won’t be needing them. You can definitely save time by cutting your dolls out AFTER you laminate them, but the edges will be a lot less likely to peel and separate from the paper if you cut them before AND after. I was also able to save laminating pouches this way.
- Arrange your dolls and clothing in laminating pouches and laminate them according to your machine’s directions.
- Cut out the laminated dolls and clothing.
- Add velcro adhesive dots to dolls and clothing, making sure to be consistent with either using all hooks or all loops sides with dolls and vice versa on the clothing. If you put loops with loops they won’t stick 😉 Another tip is to put the velcro dot on the doll, then stick it to its mate and THEN attach it to the clothing to the sticky side of the dot on the doll to be sure that the clothes match up perfectly.
- Enjoy your super durable paper dolls!
