I have been making Lil' Muslimah Dolls for about 7 or 8 years. It all started when I was looking online to see if I can find a doll for my daughter that looked like her. She wears modest, loose fitting clothes and hijāb she's been wearing since she was about 4 or 5 years old. I tried just about every search engine word I could think of, but I couldn't find anything. Well...except for one Muslim girl doll, but it's facial features creeped me out!
Anyways, after searching high and low, left and right, I realized that there really wasn't any place here in the US that sells them. So then began my mission. My mission was to make my daughter a doll that was age appropriate, dressed in a long modest dress and hijāb, and had the same skin tone as she. I set out to my nearest fabric store and bought stuffing and three different kinds of fabric. When I returned home, I started make my very first doll. It was SO ugly, subhānAllah! I tried again and again, until I finally made a doll I was please with. After all was said and done, I had 8 doll prototypes and lots of fabric scraps. I had achieved, what I believed was, success. I gave the doll to my daughter and she loved it. I also gave her the prototypes! More for her tea parties, right?
The dolls all had facial features drawn on them at the time and they were so cute. Perfect for little girls. Then I started to get this feeling that, if it was hard for me to find Muslim dolls for my daughter, what about other Muslim parents? Did they have difficulty finding one for their little girl? So now I was on another mission! My mission was to start making dolls for Muslim girls and sell them online. I perfected the art of making the dolls, started a website, and began selling dolls online. I didn't create an inventory of dolls because I didn't have any storage space for them, so I made them per order and shipped them out. The business was slow, but I managed to get a handful (literally, about 4 to 6) customers. One of them was a repeat! I loved it! After a while, I didn't get any more customers. I turned down requests for bulk orders because, in my business, it was only me making the dolls. Heck! It's still only me, but I'm not complaining. I know my limits.
After a couple of years and no orders, I felt I should take down the website and regroup. Figure things out. I still tried to sell the dolls offline at my local masjid, but I was only able to sell one and that was it. I received some concerns from other sisters about making dolls with faces and it started to bother me. They were worried about me and my incurring sin from it. I didn't take it as an insult, I took it as a gentle warning, because on the Day of Judgement, I don't want to be told to bring a doll I made with a face to life. Can you imagine? I would probably be shaking in my boots! I stopped trying to sell them altogether.
Time went by and I really wanted to make more dolls, so I decided that this time, the dolls will have no faces AND I would create a pattern that would make it easy for me to make the dolls. Not only that, the dolls would have yarn for hair. Something my old dolls didn't have. I still made sure I had 3 different skin tones: brown, light brown, and fair. The hair color are brown, black, and blonde and each doll is named. I made my first doll and it turned out okay. Made my second which was better than the first. I made my third doll and it was perfect! Alhamdulillah! I modified my pattern and I was back in business.
With the new look of the dolls, I decided to create a Facebook page for them called Lil' Muslimah Dolls and post them there. I also decided to try and sell them from that page by having people send me direct messages of their interest in a doll where I would in turn send them a PayPal invoice to complete their payment for the order. I had about 4 orders and the page received to-date 280 likes. Now that's awesome. I restarted my website within a month of the page being up, www.lilmuslimah.com, and have until today, changed the look of the website with the hopes of driving in more customers. The website has not received any orders yet and it's been up for almost 7 months. Huh (heavy sigh).
In shaa'Allah, with the new change to the look of the website and the new dolls, orders will start coming in. This is my little business. If I could do this full-time and orders were coming in steadily everyday, I'd be a happy camper. I love what I do. I only want to please Allah by providing families and friends here in the West a place to go and purchase something special and halāl for our little girls to play with and use their overly active and beautiful imagination. Not only that, but earn an income that's halāl for me. I want to go to Allah pleased with the my earnings and Him pleased with me.
I look at it as this. Allah has blessed me with a gift of sewing and an imagination. I didn't want that to go to waste. So I put it to use to do something that benefits me and the Ummah at large. The dolls are special, I believe and so are our little girls. Why not give them something that has been lovingly made just for them 100%. I literally smile after each doll is completed. I love it. It brings me joy. Just knowing that my next doll will go home to a little Muslim girl makes my heart soar above the clouds.
