Russian Nesting Dolls

On Day #2 of Camp, Mrs. DeLorbe and I taught the campers how to make Russian nesting dolls. These hollow wooden dolls come stacked inside one another. As each doll is opened, a smaller one can be found inside. The dolls are called matryoshkas (ma-TROSH-kahz) in Russian.
Here is a picture of the girls studying the Russian nesting dolls on loan from Mrs. Strand.

Many intricate patterns cover each doll. To accurately produce similar patterns on each doll, the girls practiced painting with cutips.


After practice, the girls used watercolors to paint a dress or shirt on each doll.

Once the paint had dried on our dolls, we added faces with red and black markers. We initially practiced drawing faces on yellow scrap paper.

Here are the finished products! Great job, girls!










On these particular sets, the girl had a set of twins in her family. The front face of one doll illustrates the one twin, while the back face of the same doll illustrates the other twin. Very clever!