DIY Doll Craft for Breakfast Delights

Children may now include this delightful fruit among their doll's faux edibles, by next weekend
if they so desire. Not so surprisingly, I consider this gift even more interesting than the former ones.

         In days gone by children used to anticipate a toy at the bottom of a cereal box or maybe even paper dolls printed on the side of cereal boxes. Some companies would might even give a stuffed toys away for a certain number of cereal box tops mailed in exchange for these. 

• What happened to the free cereal toys from the 90s?
• The Cereal Saga from Psych Official
• Collectible paper dolls on cereal boxes...

      Times have changed; toys are no longer used as incentive to sell the humble breakfast to us hungry westerners.  So now I present to you . . .  the humble grapefruit. So simple for any doll enthusiast to craft; it is offered as a mere cap made of bright, ruby red plastic for us to recycle if we wish to do so. 

Details of finished grapefruit cut in half.

Supply List:

• masking tape
• a lid from the grapefruit juice carton
• bit of recycled newsprint or tissue
• acrylic paints: pink, yellow, gold, white
• Mod Podge

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Children or parents must drink their grapefruit juice faithfully for a week's worth of breakfasts in order to remove the cap for this craft. (Or, just pour the juice into another pitcher.)
2. Make sure the surfaces of your grapefruit juice cap are clean and free of sticky juice residue.
3. Crush recycled tissues to fill the cavity inside the cap and to give the bottom of the cap a humped shape, like the rounded end of a grapefruit.
4. Use masking tape to cover the sides and bottom of the cap.
5. Paint the "cut" rounded bottom of the doll sized grapefruit a golden yellow.
6. Paint the top of the grapefruit cap several pinks. 
7. Highlight the edges of the shallow sculpted grapefruit with white paint.
8. Seal the painted, doll grapefruit halves with Mod Podge and serve up this breakfast fruit in a tiny bowl for your American Girl dolls. We've made a set of six grapefruit cap halves for our American Girl dolls to play with.

Left, faux grapefruit served on our best dolly china for breakfast. Right, close up details of 
tiny cap painted.