Dresses for Bobo

My latest doll purchase is Doll Factory's Pet Ari 2nd Edition Bobo. She's a very small BJD doll, but as she is a mouse, she fits in well with the Baha Cat.

Before she even arrived, I started making her some dresses using Mattel's Kelly/Shelly doll as their measurements are almost the same. Bobo is more pear shaped, though, so the dresses had to be loose at the hips.

Here are pictures of dresses I have made for her. I used the same pattern for all of them and just varied the fabrics and decorations. The pattern is available as a PDF file on my web site.

Dress with an iron-on picture:

Wool fabric with a felt flower in front and cotton yarn on the edges:

Slightly shortened pattern and lace added to the hem:

More iron-on transfers

As I still had a lot of small pictures printed on an iron-on transfer sheet, I decided to make some doll clothes using them. The best way to iron a picture on the fabric is to cut the piece first, because then it is easy to get the placement right. Here is a small top with a picture ironed on.

Here is a shirt with the picture ironed on and some of the seams sewn. This is for a Monster High doll and the pattern is included in the full set.

Here are the dolls wearing their new clothes. The pattern for Nikki's dress is available on my web site.

Miniature t-shirt iron-on transfers

I have made some shirts with iron-on transfers for the Baha Cat. My favorite is this one:

I resized pictures I had found in the web and created some myself from my own photos and printed them on a sheet of iron-on transfer paper (siirtopaperi). All you need is the paper and a color inkjet printer. The transfer paper is not cheap, but you can fit a lot of these tiny pictures on one sheet to save material.


The sheet on the left in the picture is a black and white test sheet I printed before printing on the actual transfer paper. This way, you can catch any problems before final printing.

When printing on the transfer sheet, you need to select the appropriate paper type in the printer settings as the printed image needs to be a mirror image of the original (as you can see in the picture above). This setting can be found in Printing Preferences (Windows XP) or something similar. The settings and available options vary depending on the printer, but if you have a color inkjet printer, you should be able to find "Transfer paper" in the paper type list.

In clothes as small as these, it is best to iron the transfer picture onto the fabric either before cutting the fabric or after cutting but before sewing. The instructions for ironing may vary between different manufacturers, so you should follow the instructions included in the transfer paper package.

Here is the doll wearing another shirt with a transfer picture: