Clothes for Monster High dolls

I have made some clothes for the Monster High dolls and, as I was making them, I also made the patterns for them. The piece of clothing that proved to be most difficult was the jacket. The leftmost one in the picture below is the prototype, which provided the basic pattern for modification. The rest are shown in chronological order. You may not notice any major differences between the different versions, but that is because the problem was getting the back of the jacket right. As I made the different versions of the jacket, I also made matching bottoms, mainly skirts, but the fourth picture shows the first version of trousers. I also tried different ways of closing the jacket. The one in the third picture actually has working buttons, although the button holes were a major challenge. 

Brother Dreary project

I haven't started this project yet, but I have been planning it. I got the doll this week. Here are photos of him in the original outfit.



I will dress the doll in traditional Southern Osthrobotnian clothes. I'll probably start with a better version of the Jussi sweater as I got the yarns for it.


The needle size is 2 mm and the grey yarn is for 2.5 and red for 2.5-3, but that shouldn't be a problem. The main thing is that the colors are just right.

The larger project is the men's folk costume for Southern Osthrobotnia (Härmä-Isokyrö). It consists of trousers, shirt, vest, jacket, hat, shoes, belt and knives. For copyright reasons, I cannot add a picture of the costume in this blog post, but you can find it here.

I've already got the belt as I bought a leather choker with metal parts similar to those used in the belt. It only needs a buckle, which I'll probably need to make myself once I find a good enough picture that shows what it should be like.


The most problematic part is the vest as it has proven impossible to find fabric with suitable pattern. I've decided to try card weaving as that is what I know best. The result should look good enough. The yarns I got for this are cotton and I'm not quite sure about the colors, but the book I found says that the shades used varied a good deal, so I guess these are fine. After all, I'm not going for historical accuracy, just the right kind of look.


The book also mentioned that in earlier times, the vest had similar front and back as it could be worn without a jacket, but later the jacket became so integral part of the outfit that the back of the vest could be made from different fabric. That should make things a lot easier as I only need card-woven bands for the front and can use fabric with one color for the back.

The doll will also need new shoes for the outfit. The original ones look like this.


Even if you ignore the fact that these are plastic, the design is too modern. I'm planning on making leather shoes with buckles. I already found a pair of buckles, but they are a bit too large. I'll try to find better suited ones, but if I cannot, these will do.


The book I found for reference in the library is this.


The book includes drawings of the trousers and shirt. Those are the parts of the outfit that are very hard to see in photos as the photos usually show the entire outfit with jacket and vest on.

Jussipaita

This is a 1/6 scale version of a traditional Southern Osthrobotnian pattern for men's sweater. The sweater is called "Jussipaita" (Jussi sweater).

The yarn was too thick and I needed to simplify things a lot. The pattern is too large and the collar too high, but otherwise this first version is quite all right.


I'm going to get more suitable yarn and try to make it right in the next version.

The doll is the Finnish mountain climber Veikka Gustafsson. His original outfit was an outdoors outfit with climbing gear and I got really lucky and got him on sale for 4.50 euros.

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.

Custom Kitty reroot

This was originally Toffee, the yellow kitty with yellow hair. I painted her all white and then painted the siamese cat markings. The body isn't quite finished yet, so here is just the head, which I finished today. It's my first reroot, so I used yarn to make things a bit easier. As there was not enough yarn of the same color, I used three different shades of white.

The top of the head got a bit torn when I removed the original hair as the holes were so close to each other. I fixed that problem by applying several coats of paint on the holes and applying a generous amount of sealer on top of it. The sealer helps to keep the paint from cracking too badly during rerooting, although there was one small crack. It would probably be even better to put sealer first in the holes, then paint and then more sealer.

Body for Max

I decided to make the body first, before finishing the head. There are a lot of small cracks as I didn't bother to finish the surface, because it's going to be covered in black felt.

The head is held in place with a small peg that goes into a hole in the neck and another hole in the head.

I'm going to use pipe cleaner for the arms, so I made a hole through the body. The legs are made of wood and as you can see, he can stand even without feet in place, so after I have made the feet, his balance should be fine.

Maxi Max

This is my take on the head of the figure who represents Max in the photo story. I decided to try to make a larger version of that figure and started with the head. The measurements aren't quite right and the expression is different, but it should be close enough. Now it needs to dry and then it's sanding and making the eyeballs.

Here is a time lapse video of making the head.