Famous Fashion Designer -- only in my head...

Many years ago, many more that the book cover below might suggest, I made doll clothes for everyone under the age of 15 in my neighbourhood. Seems I was the only kid within miles who could sew -- sort of... I thought I was pretty good at making clothes for dolls, I made my own patterns and had a booklet that I kept of favourites -- my friend Sharon down the road loved barbie dolls in wedding dresses and I probably made 10 of them for her! Another little girl, her name was Adele, a grown up name I thought, liked her baby doll dressed in fluffy dresses and pinafores, like Alice in Wonderland, a bit like the doll on the cover of the book, below. I don't know what happened to my own homemade book of patterns and when I "grew up" like about 16 years old, I stopped making clothes for the girls in the area. It began to seem like alot of work for 25 cents, even when the "customer" provided the fabrics (often one of their dad's old shirts!)

I discovered this book, Dolls' Clothes Pattern Book at one of the local second hand stores for $3.00 and snapped it up. Not that I want to start making all sorts of doll clothes, or even that I am particularly interested in creating doll clothes as a hobby, BUT, I have four neices, Kaydee, Lucy, Greta and Scarlette, aged 7 to 3. You know the kind of little girls in that perfect age where dolls are a big part of their lives. So being the great aunt that I am, I have started to make a collection of clothes for their dolls -- starting with the many barbies...

The first thing of course was to go get a barbie so I could fit the clothes to the doll, the books provided patterns seem to be too big for this doll, it does say it is for an 11" fashion doll, but the back pattern pieces, especially for the above jacket are at least 1/2 inch too wide, and maybe more like 3/4". I will need to refashion most of the patterns I think -- the designs are very '80's -- big shoulders!

No one has all their clothes in one type of fabric or pattern, so this morning while thinking about resizing and redoing some of the patterns in the book, I thought I would crochet a basic body vest using a pattern from the book as a guideline. It actually came out quite well -- took less than an hour to crochet and is done in one piece with only the shoulder seams needing to be sewn. Since the pattern piece in the book allowed for 1/4"seam on the back, I did not include the seam allowance at the back or as a turn under allowance on bottom, front opening or at the sleeve openings. So far, the crochet vest is my 'top of the line"...

What I learned today: Even if something works well, sometimes it makes life and creativeness more interesting to explore "options"...