Word of the month wrap up. Sundress pictures.

 I now have an armload of dolly sundresses! I had to make one. I ended up making three shirred sundresses, four standard sundresses and four party dresses from the standard sundress pattern! Grand total of ELEVEN dresses! (One was for my 18 inch doll and the pictures of her did NOT turn out so will need to be reshot.)

The dress that started it all. . .

  I'm quite happy with how this one turned out. I couldn't draw up the shirring as tightly as I would have liked to because 1. The printable fabric I used can run when wet so I wasn't brave enough to try steam blasting it with the iron; and 2. The elastic I used is extremely cheap and nasty and melts when ironed. After I'd made all the dresses I discovered that you can draw the shirring up more by just pulling on the ends of the elastic but it was too late by then.

I used pretty much the same design to make this dress for Molly, my Maru Mini Pal. . .

 I didn't realise until after I'd made it that Molly is kind of weirdly shaped in the shoulder area. Her shoulders are more the shape of a bisque doll's shoulder-plate than human shoulders. And so a design this strappy makes her shoulders look very slopey and in general makes her look lopsided and awkward.

  But the same dress also fits my Disney toddlers. . .

Although if I was making this for this doll, I would probably make it a little shorter.
AND it also fits my 14 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls. . .

This is Tabitha, a re-wigged Piper, and I LOVE this dress on her. This combination of doll and dress is definitely my favourite from this project!

  Then there are the procrastination dresses that I designed and sewed while I was putting off learning to do shirring. I made patterns, then had fun designing dresses. I worked with four doll sizes. My 14 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls, my 12 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls, my Maru Mini Pal, and my Wilde Imagination Patience dolls. Each size got a sundress and a party dress. Although in all honesty there were only two sizes because the bigger Helen Kish dolls are the same size as Maru, and the smaller Helen Kish dolls are the same size as Patience, other than a few tweaks of skirt and shoulder strap lengths.

  I really like this dress I made for the 12 inch Chrysalis girls. . .

 Originally I was going to adapt the same design for the 14 inch girls (I wish I had) but instead they got this. . .

Which I don't hate but it's really just not my style either.

 Molly got a cute little flower themed dress. . .

Which looks a lot better on her than the shirred one, I think it's the wider shoulder straps.
And it also looks alright on Ariel. . .

  And I discovered that Patience is a LOT of fun to design for. Because she has a fairly cartoonish face, I feel I can be a bit silly when designing for her and it's o'kay because she can get away with it! Nevertheless her sundress is fairly sweet and restrained. . .

I totally designed that as an excuse to use that fabric!

 While I was still planning those, I saw a flower girl dress in a shop window and thought to myself it looked like it could be made from the same pattern. So I made this for Molly. . .

 Then, of course, I had to make party dresses for the other dolls!

 My bigger Kish dolls got this. . .

This one didn't turn out how I expected and I'm not completely happy with it. But I do have an idea that it made be salvageable with a belt, but I forgot about that when I was taking the pictures and right now (while I don't love it) I'm accepting it as it is. It reminds me of the sort of dresses that people put on their daughters before sending them to a portrait session involving an ornate, vintage tea table that is, for no obvious reason, in the middle of an orchard or wheat field. (And of course all the photos must be printed in sepia tone or some other artistically faded effect.)

  My smaller Kish dolls got this dress which is definitely more fun. . .

 It had been meant to be rainbow coloured. Each tier a completely different colour. But I couldn't find the meshy gauzey stuff in four colours that worked together. It would have had to be three pastel and a fluorescent, or three brights and a pastel, and similar combinations which wouldn't have worked. So I compromised with all pink.

 I had most fun designing Patience's dress. It is definitely inspired by some of the dresses worn by various dolls based on the Tiana character from Princess and the Frog. And whilst Alice's colouring could not be more different to Tiana's, it still looks pretty cute on her. . .

Although I really probably should have styled her hair before I took these pictures.

And of course while I was taking the pictures for this post, I had to take some extra, just pretty pictures. . .

I HAD to share those two pictures of Molly, mostly because I spent an obscene amount of time editing all her flyaway hairs out of the pictures! I have discovered that I do not like her hair. It looks pretty and silky. It feels pretty and silky. But there's a curve to it, that won't go away, that's completely out of scale; and it gets flyaways like you wouldn't believe.

Even if  I don't like the dress, I do like this picture of Amarie. It reminds me of the old promotional photos for Heloise's dolls.

I don't know how I quite got this lighting in the next picture. . .

But I like it.

And of course I had to get a picture of the two littlies in their sundresses together. . .

Although Arden doesn't look like she's enjoying herself anywhere near as much as Lydia!

And then, because I loved her in that dress, I got some more pictures of Tabitha in the poppy sundress. . .

I also set up a "beach" and took some themed pictures. Unfortunately most of those are the photos that did not turn out right and no matter what I did, I couldn't fix the colour and contrast in them but here are the few that I do have. . .

Gwendolen takes a look at Adriel's sketch

Eloise waits for the other girls to come and play horseshoes with her

But they're too busy collecting shells, and complaining about all the broken ones

Arden and Lydia have decided to try to dig through to China!

But it didn't take long for them to get tired out and give up!

I still plan on making PDFs of the patterns to put on the blog but, I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's probably going to be another week depending on how much real life insists on intruding. Also I will be adding "How to make a doll's shirred sundress in any size", so more to come soon!

August Update - Beach

 I'm not sure where I was up to when I last posted. But that day I got the fabric for the shirred sundress printed and lined. Then I read instructions for shirring, both by hand and machine. Doing it by hand sounded like I'd have more control over how tight the gathers were. Shirring by machine sounds easy but in a way that makes me cynical, like it can't possibly be that easy and there are probably a million things that will go wrong. Either way, I was completely intimidated.
 I will still finish that dress. I will. But right now I'm procrastinating. But at least I'm procrastinating fairly productively. I drafted a pattern for a simple sundress and I'm using it to make four sundresses and four party dresses. Still not overly beachy but oh well. Six of them are nearly finished. Two more to make, then add press studs and shoulder straps and close the backs and they're done! That probably makes it sound like more work than it is. Hopefully tomorrow I'll either get them finished or work up the courage to finally get this shirring done.
 I don't have any pictures of my work so far, so here's a picture of the helpers I had when I was sewing yesterday.

New word of the month and printer troubles.

  I pulled out a new word of the month from my jar on Tuesday night. It's "Beach". I'm stretching that a tiny bit and making a sundress that might not be particularly beachy, but I've wanted to make it since I was eight years old. It's never been made because the entire design revolved around the fabric print that eight year old me wanted for this dress. A fabric print that doesn't exist. Luckily thirty eight year old me has a printer and printable fabric sheets! So I figured I could make the print myself! So, I dug out an old paper doll copy of the dress (I have no idea when I made it, but certainly not when I was eight!) and made up the printed pattern on photoshop.

  And then I remembered that my printer isn't working. Hasn't been working in over a month. It's copying but not printing or scanning and I haven't had the time to take a proper look to see what was wrong. My first thought when I finished making the pattern was to leave it and work the printer out later, but then I remembered that I had forms I needed to print out for the Giant Baby's  speech therapist and ear specialist, so I decided to take a look right away. (Or else I would forget about it completely.) And it turns out I'm an idiot.

  You see, about six weeks ago there was a box of Lego minifigures on top of the printer. And a certain little boy wanted very much to have a look at them, but he wasn't quite tall enough to reach, and he knocked the box of Lego down behind the printer. Then when I moved the printer to rescue the Lego, I unplugged it from my computer! I've been imagining some kind of enormous problem to do with software updates and an outdated printer. No. It just wasn't plugged in!

  At least I finally got to play with my printable silk, which worked quite well. There was a hiccup, though. I'd drawn up the print, assuming the printable fabric would be A4 in the international standard paper sizes and it turned out not to be. But at 8.5" by 11" it's close and the difference isn't really big enough to matter that much. I'm still waiting for the ink to dry (don't know how long I should wait but it says on the instructions to wait) so I haven't pulled the paper backing off yet, which means I'm not sure how thick the fabric is yet but that's ok, I plan on lining it with white cotton anyway.

1950s Project Conclusion

 I finished Jenny's new dress today. I'm pretty happy with it. It's a tiny bit longer than I meant for it to be (you should be able to just see her knees) but I'm absolutely rubbish at estimating lengths for skirts and dresses.

  The starching and grosgrain ribbon didn't make her skirt stick out quite enough so I used an off-cut of tulle to make her a stiff, tutu-like petticoat. I cheated on her knee socks (or stockings as they look like in this picture) and used a pair of baby socks that I'm pretty sure never actually fitted the Giant Baby. They fit her pretty well though.

  I made the belt buckle from a little dodad I got in a two dollar shop. It's a little plastic ring that's supposed to hold your bra straps together behind you. I covered it with the accent fabric and stuck it down with double sided tape, then added an extra cardboard backing. I'm guessing it would fall apart pretty quickly if it was being done up and undone a lot but since I don't intend on doing that, hopefully it will hold together for a year or two at least. It's not quite as neat as I would like, but it'll do.

  Even though this project is finished, I'm going to keep an eye out for some pale blue ribbon to replace the red ribbons on the ends of her plaits. So far I've not been able to find any though, so I'm just tucking her hair behind her shoulders.

  I'm aware the photos in this post aren't incredibly inspiring but unfortunately her size and lack of articulation make Jenny a nightmare to photograph, so I just found somewhere she fit and got it over and done with.
  Normally I would include the pattern for this dress and instructions for making it but it turns out my scanner is dead. If I can work out what's wrong with it, I'll add the pattern later, if not I'll tell myself nobody that reads this is likely to have the same sized doll anyway.

1950s Project Update

 Jenny's dress is coming along quite well. It has had it's share of hiccups. I can see I'm going to have to do something to force the little dodads on the shoulders to lie flat. I couldn't find quite the fabric I wanted. I would have preferred a crisp cotton or silk with polka dots. Actually now I'm wishing I'd thought to make it from white broderie anglaise with a plain light blue cotton under dress and trim. But I'm still happy with it possibly mostly because I know I would have had a hard time finding broderie anglaise in the middle of Winter.
 It doesn't have the skirt attatched yet. I wanted to starch the underskirt so the dress stuck out properly but apparently real starch (the kind you soak fabric in, not the spray on ironing kind) doesn't exist anymore. At least I can't find anywhere that sells it and nobody seems to remember it ever existing. When I was a kid, my mum used to have to starch my folk-dancing petticoats until they could stand up by themselves. That's kind of how I want the underskirt and you don't get that effect with the spray on stuff.
 Even so my mum suggested spray starching the underskirt as much as I can, then sewing some stiff net or tulle into the hem of the underskirt and covering the top of the hem with a length of grosgrain ribbon. If that works, I'll probably have this finished tomorrow. If not, I'm going to need to make a petticoat and I'd rather not have to do that.

Pedigree Brighton Belle

Cute, but probably going to kill me in my sleep eventually.

  Meet this month's victim, Jenny, a 28 inch Pedigree Brighton Belle. Pedigree dolls were very popular in Australia, England and New Zealand in the 1950s. These hard-plastic dolls fade over the years to look like they've been carved from bleached bone. They have flirty eyes and a walking mechanism and a "Mama" voice box. They look a lot like the American Saucy Walker dolls. Perhaps they were made from the same moulds?


 Mine originally belonged to a family friend who got her for her birthday in about 1956. She held onto her for years, planning to pass her down to her daughters, except she only had sons. So when I was four, she passed her down to me. At that point she still had her original dress, shoes and petticoat, (although I don't remember her ever having socks or underpants) and she was wrapped in a dry cleaning bag and put away on the top shelf of our bedroom wardrobe, to keep her nice. Her original outfit was a simple, sleeveless frock of pale blue lace over a bone-coloured, nylon, taffeta petticoat.


 A few years later my mother decided that I was old enough to have her on display in my room and washed her clothes. Her dress did not survive the washing machine. Her petticoat fared better but the press stud that did it up came off and was lost. Since then her hair's gotten a little thin from being brushed and my sister cut her fringe. At some point she lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, but I don't know whether that was before I got her or not. Her eyes are a little funny and cloudy these days, she has a chip in the back of her neck because when I was ten her head fell off. The rubber band that held it on had rotted through. My Dad replaced the rubber band but her neck got chipped in the process. Her lip paint chipped off, and my Mum repainted her lips with nail polish. Her talking box was removed so it could be taken to the doll hospital to get a replacement but for some reason it never actually got replced.

This dress probably wouldn't look so frumpy if

I gave the poor kid a petticoat.

  Over the years she's had a lot of clothes. Mostly re-purposed baby clothes but my sister and I also made her clothes. Some stuff we actually sewed. Some stuff was us adding lace or puff paint to tops our brother had outgrown. All of those clothes were lost in a house fire and for a few years she just wore her petticoat. I tried making her clothes as an adult but nothing I made suited her. The cut was wrong or the colour was wrong. And then one day, by chance, I found the dress she's wearing now in an op shop. And it fits like it was made for her. . . but I hate it. The pattern looks like old sheets, the bib is too dark, the lace is too big, the bow is too bright and the little pink appliques make no sense. So when I drew 1950s for this month's theme, I decided to make her a new dress. A proper dress. Hopefully a dress that I don't hate. So far I've drafted a basic bodice pattern but haven't fitted it yet and done some research into 1950s clothes. That has surprised me. Because of the big skirts, I always think of the 1950s as being like a romanticised version of the mid-victorian period or "Gone with the Wind" but with shorter skirts. All fluffy and frothy and pretty. To my surprise, I'm finding that despite the big skirts, the fashions of the 1950s actually tended to be cut and trimmed in very structured, masculine designs.

Jenny is terrified because Petra Wobbly Legs keeps falling over on her

  I really love this doll in a way I can't really explain, possibly because I've had her forever. And she is really well made. I have a second Pedigree doll, Petra, that's about ten years younger than Jenny. Petra is 30 inches tall and she still has her original dress and shoes and a working walker mechanism but nowhere for a voice box and the quality is just not the same. Jenny is smooth hard-plastic of the kind that's almost like bakelite. Petra is mostly hard vinyl with a hard plastic torso but it's not the same hard plastic. Petra's torso is a thinner, brittle plastic with an uneven surface that feels cheap. Jenny's hair is wigged and while it has suffered in the last sixty year, it's still nice. Petra's hair is a lovely colour butit's poorly rooted and really the fact that it's a nice colour is probably the only nice thing you can say about it. Jenny's face is adorable and lifelike with an open mouth with little teeth and a tongue inside. Petra's face is pretty generic and her eyes are weirdly squished over to one side of her face. Even Petra's shoes, which are the same size and design as Jenny's, aren't as nice. The plastic feels cheaper, the moulding isn't as crisp and they use a different kind of press stud to do up which is threatening to tear through the plastic.

Poor wobbly, wonky Petra

  So I'm going to take advantage of drawing 1950s to clean Jenny up a little (nothing drastic, just a wipe down and possibly scrub her shoes because they're filthy) and make her a new dress. Something blue and faded that hopefully won't make her look washed out.