11-inch doll clothes patterns, Barbie Patterns, Daily Patterns, Holiday Crafts, Whole Costumes for Dolls

A new variation on yesterday’s free Valentine’s Day dress pattern @ ChellyWood.com #ValentinesDay #DollClothesPatterns

A Barbie doll with African skin tone (deep, dark chocolate), models a handmade pencil-skirt dress that is made of white cotton dotted with tiny gold flecks over miniature pink and red hearts. The neckline of this dress is designed for straps, but instead, we see a red ribbon that wraps from the front of the dress around the doll's neck.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

For your free patterns and tutorial videos, please scroll down to the second set of bullets.

Isn’t this the perfect fabric for my pencil-skirt Valentine’s Day dress? I just love how this dress turned out!

Yesterday I re-posted the Valentine’s Day pencil skirt dress pattern that’s always so popular here on ChellyWood.com right around the start of February, but today I’m posting another variation on this fantastic pattern.

The image you see above shows the dress I made for my niece, Emily, for her Valentine’s Day gift this year. There’s a slight alteration in the way I’ve used ribbon with this dress, so I’m going to walk you through the changes I’ve made to the original design.

When you get to this step (see below), where you’re attaching the bodice to the gathered skirt, stop for a moment.

This photo shows a needle and thread whipstitching along the point where the dress bodice and the dress skirt are joined.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Take a length of ribbon — mine is about 9 inches long, but whatever you think will work for your doll — and either use some Fray Check to keep the ends of the ribbon from fraying:

A woman's hand holds a red ribbon, joining the ends of the ribbon which appear to be wet. Behind her hand is a bottle of "Fray Check" and in front of her hand is the partially-finished Valentine's Day Barbie dress, lying flat on a table top.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

OR, if you don’t have any Fray Check handy, just tie a knot in the ends of the ribbon, as seen below:

A woman's hand holds up a half-inch wide, bright pink ribbon. Both ends of the ribbon are tied to prevent the ribbon from fraying.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Fold the ribbon in half, like you see me doing there, and attach it to the front of the Valentine’s Day dress, with the folded center of the ribbon at the point where the bodice makes a little dip:

The open, flat bodice of the Valentine's Day dress is laying flat, with the underside of the skirt exposed on the wrong side. We can see that the skirt has been hemmed, the back closure of the skirt has been hemmed, and the bodice is lined. There are two strands of a single ribbon that extend from the center of the bodice front up toward the top part of the photo.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

As you can see here, I used a whipstitch to secure my ribbon in place:

In this close-up, we can see that the red 1/8 inch wide ribbon has been stitched to the bodice front, using white thread in a whipstitch that secures the ribbon to the inside front of the bodice at the very top of the bodice's edge.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Then continue making the dress, following all the directions as they are given in my instructional video.

A woman's hand folds the skirt of the Valentine's Day dress to sew the back of the dress closed.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Of course, if you want to make this dress, you’ll need some cotton print fabric, 1/4 inch ribbon or 1/2 inch ribbon, and some size 4/0 Dritz snaps. The free PDF sewing pattern for making today’s Valentine’s Day fashion doll dress is found in the second set of bullets, below, along with the tutorial video.

Today’s patterns will fit these dolls:

Here are your free, printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making the outfit shown at the top of this page:

Today’s blog post shows you how to make a simple ribbon alteration to the pencil skirt Valentine’s Day dress — but look at what a difference that makes!

In this photo a Barbie with a very dark skin tone and lovely feminine features appears to be walking in a handmade pencil skirt dress and red plastic flat shoes. The pencil-skirt dress is made of white cotton dotted with tiny red and pink hearts. It also has a smattering of tiny gold flecks on the fabric. The otherwise strapless dress is held up by a red ribbon that wraps from the front of the dress around the neck of the beautiful Barbie doll. Her long straight black hair seems to sway behind her as she walks.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

If you’d like to learn how to alter doll clothes patterns, I’ve got a paid course called “How to Alter Doll Clothes Patterns” available now on the Creative Spark online learning website. You might want to think about signing up!

As always, feel free to pin, like, or tweet about my free patterns and tutorials. Here’s an image of the pattern pieces you’ll need to make today’s project:

This is the JPG image of a PDF sewing pattern that's available at ChellyWood.com as a free downloadable doll clothes sewing pattern to fit dolls in the 11-inch to 11.5-inch size range (28 to 29 cm). This is a pattern for sewing a pencil skirt dress with a simple bodice. The image shows three flowers on the difficulty scale for this website's patterns, for making the pencil skirt dress.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free, printable sewing patterns for making this Valentine’s day dress and other doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

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To honor the trademark rights of the doll companies mentioned in this blog post, I am including links to their websites here. Please feel free to visit their website and consider purchasing one or more of the dolls mentioned.

Queens of Africa dolls are products offered by the Slice by Cake company, which holds the trademark for them (™). They were designed by Taofick Okoya. Please visit the Queens of Africa website to learn more about their company and its trademarked toys, books, and fashions.

Momoko dolls are products offered by Petworks, which holds the trademark for them (™). Please visit the Momoko Dolls website to learn more about their company and its trademarked toys.

Barbie, MTM Barbie, Francie, and Vintage Barbie dolls are products offered by Mattel, which holds the registered trademark for them (™). Please visit the Mattel Toys website to learn more about their company and its trademarked toys.

Liv dolls were products designed and distributed by the Spin Master company, which still makes dolls and toys today (although the Liv dolls are no longer in production at the time of this blog post). The Spin Master company held the trademark for the Liv Dolls (™). Please visit the Spin Master Toys and Games website to learn more about their company and its trademarked toys and games. Please be aware that the Chelly Wood animated doll is a Spin Master Liv doll that has been re-painted and had its wig colored to appear to look like the real doll clothing designer, Chelly Wood. This was done as a creative project by Chelly’s daughters, and the Spin Master Toys and Games company was not involved in the doll’s makeover in any way.

Disney Princess dolls are products offered by the Disney corporation, which holds the trademark for them (™). Please visit the Disney Toys website to learn more about their company and its trademarked toys.

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