I don’t make many dolls anymore. Despite this, I got the itch to make a new style of doll dress. The pattern company Oliver + S has a cute little dress pattern for 18-inch dolls called “The Tea Party Doll Dress.” My dolls are neither 18 inches nor do they have the proportions of an 18-inch doll, but the style is adorable! I decided to alter the pattern to fit my dolls.
The problem with my dolls is that, unlike a factory-produced doll, they are all a bit different. I therefore have to make a dress for the largest potential doll I might make using my current pattern & let it have more wiggle-room on the smaller dolls. To alter the pattern correctly, I used my favorite method: trial & error.
The first dress I made, using the very last scraps of some lovely polka-dot fabric and a few tiny scraps of batik, turned out to be to small for any of my current, chubbier dolls, but it fits Iris’s doll Peggy quite nicely. Peggy is a beloved doll with a shock of orange hair. She accompanied Iris through the trauma of kindergarten and will forever be the doll I hold closest to my heart.
The second dress I made uses the very last scraps of an aqua batik that I used on a dress I designed for Iris, plus some scraps of an orange batik that I found in my large bin of tiny batik scraps. It fits my current, more full-bodied dolls quite well.
After a few weeks of agonizing over design and fabrics, sewing into the wee hours of the night, and ignoring my children in the name of entertaining them (don’t ponder the conflict of interest: art should not be reasoned out too much), I ended up with two lovely little dresses.
Most likely, I will never make this dress again. The true art is in the design. Production is mere craft.
Akiva was jealous that I was taking a lot of photos of Iris. Here’s one of you, too, Akiva!
