It’s the end of #August and my #dolls are enjoying the #BeachLife @ ChellyWood.com

The image shows an 18-inch American Girl doll (Kaya) and an 18 inch Madame Alexander doll playing on a beach. The beach is a home-made diorama including a table cloth-covered wall that looks like a blue sky with quilt-batting clouds overhead and vellum wrapping paper with tinsel on top to look like water on a fake-sand beach. The two dolls seem to be enjoying the sunshine as friends at the beach. The image has a watermark that says "ChellyWood.com: free doll clothes patterns and more." The Madame Alexander doll wears a blue bikini that has been hand-sewn. Its fabric is dotted with little popsicles. The American Girl doll wears a hand-made felt shirt with nautical-print cotton shorts (also sewn by hand). Both girls wear DIY sandals to match. — Please visit ChellyWood.com for FREE printable sewing patterns to dolls of many shapes and sizes.

Here we see my American Girl doll with her friend, my Madame Alexander. These two doll-friends really remind me of myself and my cousin, Virginia. I was always afraid of the water, and Virginia would dive in before she even got her swimsuit on!

Speaking of swimsuits, guess what I’m going to offer as a free pattern this week…

The image shows an 18 inch doll (Kaya from the American Girl doll collection) wearing a handmade bikini. she stands with her feet in imaginary beach water (made from plastic table cloth, velum, and tinsel which makes the water look iridescent and foamy. Kaya's swimsuit is a bikini style, made of navy blue jersey fabric decorated in tiny stars and Popsicles. Behind her, sandals which were also handmade sit in the imaginary sand on a beach with a blue sky behind the beach. The watermark says, "ChellyWood.com" and suggests that the free printable sewing pattern for making this bikini can be found at ChellyWood.com. — Please visit ChellyWood.com for FREE printable sewing patterns to fit dolls of many shapes and sizes.

Yep, this week I’m going to offer a pattern for the bikini bottoms that my Kaya doll is modeling in the image above. Next week I’ll offer the pattern for the bikini top.

Of course her swimsuit bottoms can double as an underpants pattern (bloomers/knickers). I’ve had an 18″ doll’s underpants pattern on this website before, but I’d like to think this version is new and improved.

So please come back later this week to download the free patterns and watch the tutorial video. Meanwhile, if you’d like to show your appreciation for my free patterns by promoting this website, there are a few suggestions in the “Additional Information” section below:

Additional Information:

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Some of my followers have wondered what motivates me to give my patterns away for free.

First of all, I’m a librarian by trade. Librarians love free stuff! We believe that the more a person knows, the more enriched their life will be. So it may sound kind of crazy, but I want ChellyWood.com to become a sort of library of free patterns that help people learn to sew doll clothes.

If you’d like to learn more about my motives, feel free to visit my Chelly’s Books page.

My Gallery Page is the easiest way to search through all of my patterns to find what you want. Each image on the Gallery Page takes you to links for patterns and tutorials.

Need help printing my patterns? This link offers a tutorial showing you how to download and print my FREE patterns using Google Docs. (For the older print-a-pattern tutorial, which uses Microsoft Word, click here.) To review my difficulty scale (demonstrating how hard or easy a pattern is by the number of flowers displayed), take a look back at this blog post.

Please note: you must enlarge my patterns to fit a full-sized piece of American computer paper (8.5 x 11 inches or 216 x 279 mm) without margins, before printing.

My patterns are now available through “Creative Commons Attribution.” This means that I created my patterns (and therefore I own rights to them), but I’m willing to share them with everyone who will tell people about my website.

Here are some helpful ways to tell the world about my patterns:

You can pin them on Pinterest.
You can like them on Facebook.
You can tweet about them.
Use any other form of social media that appeals to you!

Are you new to sewing? I’ve got a playlist of tutorials for the beginning sewists on my YouTube channel. It includes video tutorials showing you how to do a basic straight stitch when sewing by hand, how to use the whipstitch to hem a garment, how to sew on snaps, and even how to design your own doll clothes patterns, for those who are new to design and alterations.

In case you haven’t heard, I have actually designed some commercial patterns for Lammily LLC. You might want to visit the Lammily website to see what they’ve got going on.

If your question wasn’t answered here, feel free to submit a question. I’m always happy to help my followers find what they need, so they, too, can make amazing doll clothes and crafts.