Sew a #sunflower #harvest #season dress for #dolls w/FREE pattern @ ChellyWood.com

The image shows Chelly Wood's hand holding a delicately hand-stitched dress made of burgundy fabric that's dotted with little yellow sunflowers. A yellow petticoat dips out from under the full skirt of the dress, and the dress's rickrack edging forms a wavy scallop along the division line between the dress itself and the petticoat. The dress has very short cap sleeves. The petticoat, too, has a scalloped edge, which has been formed by attaching rickrack to the underside of the petticoat. This handmade dress will fit Barbie and most 11.5 inch fashion dolls of similar size and shape. The overlay on this photograph says: ChellyWood.com, "Free printable sewing patterns for dolls of many shapes and sizes." — Please visit ChellyWood.com for FREE printable sewing patterns to fit dolls of many shapes and sizes.

This week’s project is what I’ve dubbed my “Sunflower Harvest” dress. It’s designed for most 11.5 inch fashion dolls, including but not limited to Mattel’s Barbie, Queens of Africa, the old Spin Master Liv dolls from the 1990’s, the 10 or 11-inch Disney Princess dolls, and many similar-sized fashion dolls.

After making this dress, I gave it away to a friend’s little girl. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of it before I gave it away as a birthday gift. Silly me! So I went over to their house recently and took some pictures of their doll modeling the dress:

The image shows a little girl's hand holding up a Mattel Barbie doll. The doll wears a handmade dress in harvest colors of burgundy and yellow. The dress has a scalloped edge (formed by adding rickrack to the underside of both the dress's skirt and the petticoat). It also has cap sleeves that fit the doll very sharply. The overlay says, "ChellyWood.com: free printable patterns and tutorials." — Please visit ChellyWood.com for FREE printable sewing patterns to fit dolls of many shapes and sizes.

I’d like to extend a special word of thanks to Gabrielle and Mary for giving me one more opportunity to photograph this little dress. Hopefully they will have hours of fun playing with both the dress and the apron (shown below):

Please click here for a link to all the patterns and tutorials you’ll need to make this outfit: (coming soon)

As you can see in the image above, the apron that we made last week makes a wonderful “pinafore” for this dress! So later, when I repost all the patterns to make this outfit, I’ll definitely include the patterns and tutorials for making the apron as well as the “Sunflower Harvest” dress.

Well, that’s it for this week’s look ahead at the “Sunflower Harvest” dress project. Remember that I’m planning to place ChellyWood.com in the construction zone soon. For more information, please have a look at 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.

Please be advised: when I get some time off from my job as a school librarian, I’m planning to develop a new layout for ChellyWood.com, and whenever you redesign something, it’s possible for stuff to get lost! So if there’s a specific pattern you’ve bookmarked because you want to make that outfit, I advise printing the pattern soon. Links may not work quite as well after I redesign my website.

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 post or 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. You can also write to Chelly Wood at this address. I’m always happy to help my followers find what they need, so they, too, can make amazing doll clothes and crafts.