eleven colorful hand painted wooden peg dolls in a garden setting

DIY Painted Wooden Peg Dolls

Today I want to share a DIY painted wooden peg dolls tutorial with you. I recently hand painted these wooden peg dolls as a birthday gift for one of my nieces who is turning four this week. Making these personalized peg dolls was very simple to do and took me just a couple of hours. But I decided to share it nonetheless in case you are on the lookout for a simple and personal gift idea for a child.

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hand painted wooden peg dolls in a garden

List of Materials

Creating these personalized peg dolls is so simple that you need very few materials.

  • Wooden Peg Dolls

If you have some woodworking experience you could make the peg dolls yourself. Since I don’t, I decided to purchase them as a set on Etsy. The shop I ordered them from is currently on a break but you can find some similar sets here and here.

eleven unfinished wooden peg dolls standing on a wooden surface
  • Suitable Paint

You have various options when it comes to the paint. I used some acrylic permanent pens that work for different surfaces. The brand I used doesn’t seem to be available worldwide but here is a very similar set.

permanent acrylic pens in various colors next to some unfinished wooden peg dolls

The reason I chose an acrylic paint was simply because that’s what I had in my house already. You can use several other paints for painting wood. I found this blog post that lists the different paint options and talks about their pros and cons in detail.

I imagine that using natural dyes would be a very lovely alternative. To be honest, my original plan was to make some dye solution and naturally dye the peg dolls. Unfortunately I ran out of time and opted for the permanent pens instead.

Instructions for DIY Painted Wooden Peg Dolls

  1. Decide on how you want the peg dolls to look like. The possibilities are nearly endless. You could recreate the family members of the child you want to gift the peg dolls to. You could do crib figurines. Or fairies. Or gnomes. Whatever comes to mind. If you are looking for inspiration, I can highly recommend that you check out Pinterest.
  1. Start painting. Depending on how much painting practice you have and how elaborate your designs are, the amount of time you need will vary. As a point of reference, it took me about 3-4 hours to paint my eleven peg dolls.

And if you just like this gift idea but don’t feel like hand painting the peg dolls yourself, there are of course several options to purchase already painted peg dolls on Etsy.

Woodland Animal Peg Dolls

Pastel Peg Dolls

Seasonal Dolls

Pin It For Later: DIY Painted Wooden Peg Dolls

two pictures of colorful hand painted wooden peg dolls

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Annika

I am a yarn dyeing artist, writer and educator.
I am also an avid knitter and love to create something with my hands every day.
Read more about me here:
https://rosemaryandpinesfiberarts.de/about-the-writer/

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4 Comments

  1. Charlie Hood says:

    I have some wooden birthday candle holders that were bought for me as child. I am not an artist so I really don’t want to tackle this project. I would love for someone who knows they are doing to see if they can refurbish. If you have recommendations that would be great. Thank you.

    1. says:

      Hi Charlie, It probably would be easiest if you could find someone locally and discuss the project in person. Another option that came to my mind was to look for an artist whose work you like over on Etsy. You can search for Etsy shop owners in your country by using a filter. Then the shipping costs back and forth won’t be too high. A lot of Etsy shop owners do custom orders. Hope that helps. Kind regards Annika

  2. cheryl says:

    those are so cute, thanks for sharing and also for sharing where to get the blank doll forms.

    1. says:

      Thank you so much and you’re welcome! I am really happy how they turned out and it was very fun to create them.

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