Simplicity patterns can inspire your own pattern designs! #Simplicity #DollClothes

The image shows the Chelly Wood look-alike doll (actually a repainted Spin Master Liv doll) holding up Simplicity doll clothes pattern 2296, which is designed by Simplicity pattern company to fit 18 inch dolls like the American Girl dolls. this doll clothes pattern includes five different styles of dresses and two pants suit separates. The image is watermarked with the Chelly Wood dot com logo.

Can you guess which of my own doll clothes designs was inspired by one of the outfits on this Simplicity doll clothes pattern #2296?

I don’t copy other people’s patterns, but sometimes I sew Simplicity doll clothes patterns to get ideas about how to create my own patterns and how my own version of the pattern might fit together.

For example, the Crissy “beach comber” outfit that I recently designed was inspired, in part, by Simplicity doll clothes pattern #2296:

Can you see how that pattern looks kind of like the one that the yellow arrow is pointing to in the image below?

Of course my version had to fit a vintage Crissy doll, which has a very different body type when compared to most 18-inch dolls today, like the American Girl dolls, Journey Girls, and Amazon’s Adora Amazing Girl dolls.

And I added a rounded collar to my version of this outfit. Plus, I used felt for my shirt, whereas their pattern recommends more traditional doll clothes fabrics like stretch jersey fabric and cotton. When you take a pattern and make creative changes to it (like my rounded collar), we call that “pattern alterations.”

If you’d like to navigate over to the free pattern for my “beach comber” Crissy doll outfit, here’s a link to that blog post.

Look again at the image above. The purple arrow in that Simplicity doll clothes pattern #2296 image points to a dress that has a multi-layered skirt. Last year I created a similar skirt for smaller dolls:

The image shows a three-layered skirt. The top layer has a peachy-pink cotton fabric; the second layer uses white eyelet cotton fabric; the bottom layer is made of grey pinstripe cotton/polyester fabric. The image is watermarked with the new Chelly Wood dot com logo.

Notice how I even used similar colors for my little skirt? It’s fun to experiment with the fabrics you have at home to see if you can pull off a similar look as the ones on the front of a Simplicity pattern.

Would you like to learn how to alter your doll clothes patterns?

Some time later this year, I’ll be teaching a class with Creative Spark on how to alter the patterns you already own to form new patterns. So if you have old patterns laying around that you were thinking about selling at a summer yard sale, don’t do it! We can re-fashion those old styles to modernize them!

If you’d like to learn more about my upcoming class, please follow this blog, follow my YouTube channel, or sign up for the Creative Spark newsletter, so you’ll hear about my pattern alteration class when it’s offered.

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Chelly Wood and the ChellyWood.com website are not affiliated with the pattern company or companies mentioned in this blog post, but Chelly finds inspiration in the doll clothes designed by these pattern companies. To purchase patterns from Simplicity, McCall’s, Butterick, or other pattern companies shown and discussed in this blog post, please click on the links provided here. These links below the “Disclaimer” section do not help raise money for this free pattern website; they are only offered to give credit to the company that made these patterns.