Using a stopwatch app, future plans, recycling leather

I wanted to know how long it really takes to convert a t-shirt to a long-sleeved one, so I downloaded a stopwatch app and set to find out.

Then I copied several patterns at once as I knew I wanted to make these at some point.

Buying new leather is not something I like to do, so second hand stores are a great source of materials. I got a great deal on some used leather jackets.

How long does it take to sew a shirt

I made more shirts using the same pattern I used for the pink t-shirt. These have long sleeves as I modified the pattern. Mainly I was curious about the time it takes to sew one of these shirts. In this first video, I'm sewing the shirt in real time, without edits.

And in the second one, I used a timer to get the total time from intact t-shirt to a ready made altered shirt.

T-shirt gets a new life, part 2

This is the second (and last) part of altering the pink t-shirt. 

Moonspell jeans vest

An old t-shirt was unusable, because the back was too badly worn, so the picture got a new life in the back of a vest. 

T-shirt gets a new life, part 1

The video below is the first part about altering an old t-shirt. The process starts with assembling, copying and altering the pattern to fit me.

Arts in the Afternoon, part 2

I did some more resizing with the Arts in the Afternoon pattern. I really like the red/gold fabric I used for Cissy's top, but unfortunately there wasn't enough of it for a skirt, so I had to use different fabric for that. It's a pity, because the outfit looks so much better when both parts are made of the same fabric.

I used velcro closing for everything else, but Cissy skirt has a proper zipper. I had a 4 cm zipper, which I sewed in place in the same way as we did in one of the exercises a couple of weeks ago.

I also made a dress for Miss Piggy. In this one, I used a pattern from Rosemary Ionker's book "Fashion Doll Clothing." The pattern is the skirt on page 85. I resized it to fit Piggy and then made the bodice pattern myself. In the book, the doll has a skirt and jacket, but I wanted this to be a dress, and it wasn't that hard to make a bodice of this type. The necklace is a cheap bracelet that's long enough to fit Piggy. The other 14"-16" dolls have so much smaller neck that using their jewelry on Piggy just isn't possible.

Arts in the Afternoon

I'm currently much more comfortable with clothes patterns than before, so I had no trouble resizing a simple Barbie pattern to fit a Living Dead Doll. The outfit is "Arts in the Afternoon" from Mari DeWitt's book "Vintage Clothing for the Fashion Doll."

First, here is the outfit as shown in the book. I have made this for Barbie, and as it is a fairly simple design, I wanted to try it in a different size.

Here is the original pattern in the book and the reduced pattern for the Living Dead Doll.

Here are the pieces about halfway through the process. I'm not going through the process here, because of copyright issues, but you can see for yourself how this is done.

And here is the other side of the same piece. The lining is attached to the outer part, which makes sewing a lot easier. Of course you could just as well make this without a lining, which is what I usually do just to keep the seams thinner.

After this, you just sew the side seams and attach a closing mechanism, in this case pieces of velcro, and the top is finished. I made the skirt out of a rectangular piece of fabric, which I put around the doll to see where and how many darts were needed. The skirt is also lined using the same fabric as in the picture above.

Using an old shirt as a pattern for a new one

One of my favorite shirts was coming to the end of its useful life. There was a huge hole in the left sleeve, and I didn't see a way to fix it, so I decided I'd rather use the shirt for making a pattern for a new one.

I cut open all the seams and got confirmation for what I had been suspecting. I always thought the seams were a bit twisted, and folding the front piece in half showed me that it was the case. This meant that I had to make the patterns as halves, so I cut from the fold and kept the wider half, which I cut a bit narrower while straightening the side.

Here are the pieces I used as patterns. The back piece needed straightening as well, because it was just as twisted as the front.

Here are the new front and back. The pattern in the fabric would have been very hard to align at the edges, so I just made sure they were aligned vertically, that is, the colors matched at the seams.

I even matched the colors in the sleeves. I could have saved some fabric by not doing this, but I wanted the sleeves to be identical. I have seen shirts on sale for which this has not been done, and I think it's just lazy (unless it's part of the design).

I'm not good at getting the sleeves right, so I decided to assemble the shirt in slightly wrong order. After sewing the pieces together as shown in the photo below, I sewed all the side seams. I sewed them from the arm pit to wrist and arm pit to waist, so it was four seams. At least the arm pit seams are extra strong as the seams overlap there for a bit. 

My sewing machine is Pfaff Passport 3.0 and has the following stitches. I used number 15 for combining the pieces and number 12 for all the edges where the fabric was folded. 

Here is the finished shirt. It's the right size and feels very comfortable, so I'd say it's a success. And now I have the patterns for making more of these, if I want (if I happen to find some nice fabric I want to make into a shirt).

Baha Cat's shirt

The shirt for Baha Cat's folk costume is not made of right kind of fabric, but it looks good enough for the purpose. The pieces are all rectangles, with seams on the shoulders and sleeves.


I was going to sew the cuffs and collar in place, but as the fabric was a bit stretchy, I thought fabric glue would be a better choice. It does look neater this way. The opening on the back is closed with two snaps and the cuffs are closed with one snap each. Actually, there should be buttons, but for this small scale, I'm content with this solution.



Related earlier posts:
Baha Cat's vest and stuff for Brother Dreary
Hat for the Baha Cat
Shoes for the Baha Cat's costume
Helavyö

Shirt, trousers and jacket for a Living Dead Doll

I didn't make a pattern of the first suit I made for Schizo, but this time I made sure I had paper copies of the pieces I used for the clothes. I was first going to make just the jacket and trousers, but then thought it would be useful to have a shirt as well. It is sleeveless, so it is easier to fit under the jacket.

Both shirt and trousers have an opening on the back, because snaps or buttons on the front make bulges that don't look nice. I noticed that with Schizo's trousers. The fabric used for the shirt is slightly stretchy, but as this doll's arms move a bit better than Schizo's, another kind of fabric would have worked as well.

The pattern is available on my web site as a PDF file.

Fitting shirt for a less articulated doll

The problem with dolls that have straight arms that go slightly outwards from the body is getting certain items of clothing on the doll. For example, if the hands are far from each other, you need a very wide shirt or one made of very stretchy material. I solved the problem by making the shirt in two parts.

In the picture, you can see that, instead of having front and back pieces, this one has left and right. There will be opening in both front and back.


This is the finished shirt. I used velcro for fastening and attached some trimming in front, because I didn't feel like sewing in fake buttons.



Here is the shirt on a Living Dead Doll.

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: