The image at the top of this blog post was created by taking a series of screenshots from my “Home” page gallery. ChellyWood.com now has too many images to fit in the gallery, which is why my blog has been under re-construction since November of 2018.
It’s about to change in a BIG way, too, so I wanted to give my regular blog followers a “heads-up” and warn you that “A Change Is Gonna Come!”
You may be wondering why? How? Let me take you for a brief ride on the Chelly Wood “Way Back Machine”…
Back in 2014, I had started to design and sew a bunch of doll clothes for the stop-motion video of Romeo and Juliet that I was filming with the help of my two daughters who were 12 and 14 at that time.
In the early days of this blog, I simply drew out all my doll clothes patterns by hand. I was just havin’ fun with my daughters and sharing our fun with the world. These early patterns still exist on this website, but they’re very simplistic as you can see here:
There were no difficulty scales, no seam allowances, no CC marks, and very little in the way of printing and cutting instructions.
Then the requests started coming in, and I really, truly enjoyed designing patterns for my growing number of followers. On ChellyWood.com, my free doll clothes sewing patterns have been downloaded 290,000 times — that’s over a quarter of a million downloads! Whew!
You guys have been benefiting from my free patterns, and I’m super proud of that!
I created new patterns nearly every week, so with an average of one new pattern per week, that made a total of 208 free printable sewing patterns for a variety of different dolls’ clothes by the end of 2017. (It’s closer to 300 patterns now.)
My videos improved with time and practice, as well, and my daughters–now in high school and college–designed a doll who looked just like me, to add personality to my videos:
Then, in late 2017, I started getting comments from followers who couldn’t find the patterns they wanted. The gallery page had so many patterns, it actually overloaded! It was “dropping” patterns into cyberspace as I imported new ones! Oh no!
How did I react to that realization? Scroll down and you’ll see…
That’s right! I was praying HARD that the whole system wouldn’t crash and burn! WordPress, it seems (my web host) only allows 100 images per gallery, but my gallery had twice that many! No wonder some of my patterns completely disappeared!
To prevent further kerfuffles, the format of the gallery pages would have to change to multiple galleries that would use extensions. I’m planning to make this change in one week to ten days, but as with any big tech change, I’m expecting to find glitches.
As I make the transition to the new website design, if you find that some of the links aren’t working, please submit a question or leave a comment to let me know the specifics. Please describe or take a screenshot of the outfit you want to sew, and I’ll do my best to correct the problem as quickly as I can.
If you take a screenshot, you’ll need to submit a question first; then, when I respond to your initial email, you’ll be able to send me the screenshot. This really helps me figure out what page to go back and fix.
Leaving a comment on the page that has a non-functional link works pretty well too.
But today I’m giving you advanced warning… you still have time to download a bunch of patterns to sew while we transition to the new layout! My advice is to load up! Grab your patterns now before things get CRAZY around here!
Once I make that leap of faith–once the website format changes–with your help, my faithful followers, I’ll do my best to turn ChellyWood.com into an amazing library of free, printable sewing patterns for dolls of many shapes and sizes, that the whole world can access with ease.
Thanks, in advance, for your patience and assistance as I make this momentous transition!