Green velvet dress

The next dress made with patterns from a book is a long dress made of green velvet. The book is Rosemarie Ionker's "Fashion Doll Clothing," and the pattern is on pages 97-98. The pattern is for Madame Alexander's Alex, but I was making the dress for the CED doll Colin. That meant more resizing.

I started by resizing the pattern to the best of my abilities. I took the necessary measurements and added length and width as required.

However, I didn't trust my patterns, so I made a prototype of the bodice. I suspected the front might be too wide, which turned out to be the case. As I hadn't sewn the front middle seam, it was easy to pin it to get the bodice to the right size. All I had to do then was to adjust the patterns accordingly.

The lower part of the pattern was easier to resize as it only required adding some length. Thinking of this afterwards, the fabric wasn't the best choice for this design due to the number of panels, but I didn't think of that when I started.

After sewing all the pieces together, the dress was fitting surprisingly well. The patterns I made weren't perfect, but good for a first attempt. Maybe I'll make another dress using more suitable material now that I know what still needs fixing.

I sewed a zipper on the back, because it's the easiest closing mechanism for a dress like this. Here you can see some of the problems I had with the fabric. Fortunately, it's all in the back and out of sight most of the time.

Here's the finished dress after making the sleeves and finishing all the edges. I think it's looks nice enough, and what it especially does is give Colin a more normal body shape. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with her measurements, but she doesn't look very good in narrow skirts.

Here's a closeup of the shoes. I made these over 10 years ago, I think. The color is maybe a bit too light to go with the dress, but at least they're green.

Different collars

This has been a remote learning week, so I've been doing some exercises at home. Monday and Tuesday were all theory as I was learning about textile materials and making a Power Point presentation about them. I was also examining 10 items of clothing from my wardrobe to see what material they were made of and describe the reasons why I had chosen those clothes. 

The latter was interesting and also very revealing. I hadn't really thought about the issue, but it turns out that the price is the number one criterion for my clothes purchases. Of course I buy clothes I like, but I'm always seeking discounts by buying stuff at the "wrong" time of the year. That's the benefit of not caring about fashion, you can happily purchase clothes at the end of the season sales without worrying that they'll be out of fashion the next time the weather is right for using them.

On Wednesday, I was drawing patterns for collars. The teacher provided us with videos showing how it's done and also printouts of the finished drawings. All we had to do was to recreate the drawings with the help of the videos. That wasn't too difficult, but things started to get a bit more complicated when I read the instructions on how to make the collars. Fortunately we didn't need to make them, just draw the patterns.

I ended up making two of the simplest ones in 1/4 scale for dolls as I used the doll measurements for making the patterns. I used the leather armor prototype for the simplest collar, because the fabric is non-fraying and it was quick and easy to get a nice result.

For the other collar, I used a jacket prototype I made for Miss Piggy some time ago. I'm not sure if I'm going to finish the jacket, but it was perfect for trying the collar.

Yesterday, I was making pockets for the vest that is my next project. I've got an existing vest as a model, and it's got quite complicated pockets, which I'm recreating for my new vest. I made one prototype pocket at school before the spring break, so all the problems got sorted out then. Now I'm just making two more pockets and writing the instructions for them and drawing the diagrams for the different seams. I'm also taking a lot pictures, so I'll probably write a post about the pockets later.

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.

Leather armor, part 1

Ever since I got this Eowyn's helmet and found out it fits Tyler dolls, I've been thinking of making an entire outfit for the doll to go with the helmet.

The plan has been on hold for a long time, but today I started planning some leather armor. First I made a paper pattern by wrapping paper around the doll and forming the required shape, then cutting that into patterns.

The next step was to make a prototype. I started with fabric. I had to add seam allowances to the patterns for this. The actual patterns won't have them as the edges of the leather will go side by side, not overlapping any.

This bodice turned out to be too big. Fine for a dress, not so for armor. I'll probably make a dress using this at some point, but now I'm interested in making armor.

I reduced the patterns a bit and also got rid of most of the curves in favor of straight lines. I made the second prototype out of thick felt as I wanted material that would be approximately the same stiffness as the leather I'm going to use. Below are the parts of the bodice. I decided to cut the back piece into two separate pieces as there needs to be slight curve there.

This is the felt bodice and it's the correct size considering that there will be some clothes under it. The lower part of the armor will be strips of leather sewn to the lower edge of the bodice. I'm also planning on adding some shoulder and upper arm pieces, but those can be planned later. First I'm going to make the basic piece and additional parts will be easier to plan when I've got that.

I now have working patterns for the bodice, so the next step will be to make it out of leather. I remember doing some leather decorating as a kid, so I'll need to look into that, because it would be nice to have decorated armor instead of one of plain leather.

I haven't thought about the details of the clothes that go underneath the armor, but it'll be at least a shirt and trousers. I've made some repros of historical clothing, so the designs won't be a problem. Some sort of boots are also needed, but I'll need to do a bit of research on that, because I'd like to be a bit more accurate about them.

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.

The bunny bag

I finished the bag I mentioned in the previous post. It's made of slightly stretchy peach colored fabric with cotton and padding for the lining and the bunny picture on the flap. The picture below shows all the pieces. The structure is mostly the same as in the bag with geometrical patterns I made earlier.

This bag has a lining, and it is made in the same way as in the makeup bag, except the top is open. I first stitched the cotton and padding together close to the edges and then sewed the pieces together, leaving 1 cm seam allowances. The inside pocket was made before stitching the cotton and padding together.

I used velcro for closing as I had no buckles left. The front of the bag has vertical pieces of velcro for adjustment, while the underside of the flap has a long horizontal piece. The order of making the flap is as follows: sew the velcro into the underside piece of the flap, stitch all layers together near the edges, sew bias binding to the side and bottom edges of the flap, and finally sew the flap to the back piece of the bag.

The next step was to sew the front, back and side pieces together to form the outside of the bag. Once that is done, turn the bag right side out and insert the lining.

This is the finished bag. You can either turn the upper edges of the lining outside and stitch the edge or use bias binding for the edge. I had some issues with measurements, and it was easiest to cut the upper edge of the lining along the upper edge of the outside and use bias binding.

The shoulder strap was a bit tricky to sew in place, because of the number of layers of fabric, but my sewing machine was just able to manage it. Any more layers would have been impossible. Like with the first bag, I did not make an adjustable strap, because I haven't been adjusting the strap of the bag I originally used as the model, so that length is just right. Note also that I sewed the strap in place last. Normally it should have been sewn before attaching the lining, but as the outside fabric was stretchy, I wanted to attach the strap also to the non-stretchy lining to help the bag keep its shape.

Here is the outside of the finished bag. There are some errors that are due to the peach fabric being stretchy, but I decided to ignore them. This was basically a prototype, just for testing what the result would be like. And the most important lesson I learned is that using stretchy fabrics for something like this isn't a good idea.

Last couple of weeks

The only finished item for the last couple of weeks is a skirt. It took ages and I was starting to feel quite desperate with all the alterations that had to be made to make it fit the customer (another student for whom I was making it). However, I managed to finish it and it looks nice, although I can't stop thinking of all the things that went wrong with it and had to be fixed.

I think the best thing I learned with this was how to sew a zipper that's totally hidden when it's closed. It took a couple of tries, but the result looks nice.

We also learned another way to sew a zipper for a skirt. This one was done on a piece of fabric as it was just an exercise. I used the skirt fabric as I was doing this before starting to sew the skirt and wanted to practice a bit with the fabric as the teachers said it wouldn't be the easiest fabric to sew. They were right, it was slippery and difficult to keep in check in addition to being really resistant to ironing (just couldn't get it flat no matter how hard I tried).

The next project will be a vest, which I'll be making for myself based on one I've had for 10 years or so. However, next week is the spring break and on week 10 we won't be going to school because of the new restrictions laid out this week. There haven't been any cases in our school in several weeks, so I think the measures we've had in place would have been enough, but obviously people in charge think otherwise.

So, after the break it'll be some theory on textile materials, plus sewing some pockets for the vest. And of course I've got my private projects, the current one being one in which I'm using the bunny picture from the previous post. I'll be posting about that once it's ready.

On a final note, Lidl again had one of the sewing thread sets I really like. The thread isn't the best quality, but it works for doll clothes at least. The reason I like it so much is that you get a good selection of colors, and every color also comes in spools, so you don't need to do that yourself. I think it's a good deal for 6.99€.