Crafts and Hobbies, Old Patterns from Chelly's Collection, Tips for Beginners, Tutorials: Sewing Basics, Uncategorized

How to cut out a Barbie doll clothes sewing pattern Part 5 (How do you cut it?) #SewingForBeginners #DollClothesPatterns #Sewing

A woman's hand is shown folding a piece of purple felt in half. The felt lies on a grid-printed cutting mat.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Last week, we were learning how to cut out a Barbie doll clothes sewing pattern. I’m continuing that train of thought in today’s blog post, which reviews the cutting steps and adds a few details.

When you’re getting ready to cut out your doll clothes patterns, it can be very helpful to see which garment pieces will need two identical pieces cut. For these, you can save time by folding your fabric in half before you lay out your pattern pieces and pin them on the fabric.

Read the pattern itself to see which pattern pieces say “cut 1” and which pattern pieces say “cut 2” before you do this. You only want to pin the “cut 2” pieces onto the folded fabric. Any “cut 1” pieces should be laid out on a single swatch of un-folded fabric.

In this image, the purple felt has been folded, but unevenly. A pink arrow points to an area of the felt where there's only one layer. A doll's coat or bathrobe pattern has been laid across the purple felt, with its center line cut flush against the folded edge of the felt. A green arrow points at the word "fold" along this center line of the pattern. The purple felt is thick and therefore it is puffy along the fold. A yellow arrow points at this puffiness toward the bottom of the fabric, at the base of the coat pattern.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Some pattern pieces may say, “Cut on Fold,” which means you must fold the fabric, as shown in the image above (see yellow arrow), but carefully lay the pattern’s fold line right up against the edge of the folded fabric (see green arrow).

When you go to cut this pattern, you won’t cut the folded area. Instead, when you unpin the coat from the fabric, it will open out, to form a single piece, showing both sleeves.

In this image, we see three garment pieces, two front cuts of a coat for Barbie and one back cut of a coat for Barbie. The two cuts each show one sleeve, while the single cut shows both sleeves. The arrows pointing at the one-cut-single-sleeve pieces say, "these pieces were cut on folded fabric, but neither piece was laid on the folded edge of the fabric. The single garment piece with two sleeves says, "this piece was cut on the fold."
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Whenever possible, it’s also a good idea to think about how you can cut out your patterns in ways that use less surface area of fabric.

That way, when you’re done cutting, you’ll be able to use the leftover fabric for other projects.

In a series of four images, we are shown the following: Purple fabric has had the jacket pattern cut out and removed, leaving behind a remnant shaped remarkably like a hammerhead shark. The head of the fabric "shark" is shown with a strapless doll dress bodice overlaid on top of it, demonstrating that enough fabric was left over to make a bodice for a dress. In the center of the image, we see an enlarged image of the coat pattern laying on the fold of fabric, right where the pattern says "fold." At the bottom, we can see that after pinning a coat pattern to purple felt fabric, the pattern has warped and wrinkled, making edges less accurate for someone who wants to cut the pattern out of this felt fabric.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

The tricky part of pinning the pattern onto the fabric (besides being extra careful that you align the fold line markings with the fabric’s fold) is keeping the pattern from wrinkling and keeping the fabric from rippling when you pin your patterns (see yellow arrow above — the lumpy fabric example).

When we make clothes for people, we use a technique in which we keep the fabric lying flat on a level surface (like a table). As long as you don’t lift up the fabric, you should be fine.

But with doll clothes patterns, they can be very tiny. It’s HARD to keep the fabric level! Especially when you’re cutting out really teeny-tiny pieces, like this Barbie hat pattern from Simplicity 7601 (see figure 1):

Here we see three steps to cutting out a doll's hat pattern. In Figure one, the image shows both the hat top and the hat's crown have been pinned onto the purple felt fabric. In figure 2, someone has cut around the perimeter of the hat's top with scissors, but they haven't cut closely enough to really carefully follow the edge of the pattern. In figure 3, the pattern has been more carefully cut around, removing excess fabric all around the shape of the hat pattern, including the dart (triangle shape) at one end of the hat's crown.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

A trick I use is this… Instead of pinning all the pieces to the fabric before you begin cutting, just lay them on top first to see if they’ll fit. Then, as long as you can remember how you had them arranged, take off the ones you’re not cutting for the moment.

See figure 2 above? Cut around teeny-tiny pieces, leaving a bit of a “margin,” so to speak. Then — contrary to the way we cut people’s clothes — pick up the little garment piece (which still has its pattern piece pinned to it) and trim away the excess fabric (see Figure 3).

This is especially helpful with really, teeny-tiny garment pieces for small dolls like Barbie.

In this photo, we see two pairs of scissors lying next to an uncut pattern for a doll hat's brim. One pair of scissors has a grey handle; the other pair of scissors has a purple handle.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Fabric isn’t easily cut with regular craft scissors. Instead, you’ll need to buy a pair of good sewing scissors. Otherwise you can damage both your fabric and your pattern.

Carefully cut around all notches. To learn more about notches, please go back to an earlier blog post from this week, in which we discussed notches and grainlines (the arrows which appear on many patterns).

On the grid of a cutting mat, we can see a doll's hat crown and top have both been cut out. The notch on the bottom of the hat's top piece (this notch points south) faces, and seems to almost point at, the notch on the top of the hat's crown piece (this notch points north). A purple arrow points at these two notches which face each other. A pink arrow points at a notch that's on the (east) side of the crown piece, and opposite of this, a yellow arrow points at a notch on the other side (west side) of the crown piece.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

If you look at the big purple arrow in the image above, you’ll see that the hat top has a notch that will later align with the hat’s crown. Then, when we sew the crown’s edge all the way around the hat’s top, the notches that my yellow and pink arrows are pointing at will join at the side of the hat’s crown.

Okay, so you’ve cut out your garment pieces. What do you do next?

Sometimes cutting takes a while. I may have to stop sewing for a bit and go take care of some family matters.

If I need to leave the cut garment pieces lying around for a bit, I pin their pattern pieces to them with a single pin running through the paper pattern and the fabric of the garment piece. That way each garment piece is sort of “labeled” for when I come back.

Here we see the cut-out pieces for several Barbie doll clothes pieces: a jacket front, a jacket back, a hat top, and a hat's crown. The patterns lay over the top of the fabric, but they are held there by one straight pin each, with the straight pin inserted (in, then back out) once, in the center of the pattern, to hold the patterns to the garment pieces.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

This will keep you from confusing the coat’s front pieces with the coat’s back pieces, etc…

Now, this “Shorts” video, from my YouTube channel, will show you ALL the steps to cutting out a pattern, that have been covered in this week-long series of blog posts:

The patterns I was using today came from Simplicity doll clothes pattern 7601, which offers a lovely coat-hat-and-purse set of patterns.

In this image, we see a modern Barbie modeling a handmade coat, hat, and purse. The Barbie has pink lipstick on and pink shoes. Her complexion is like dark chocolate and her hair is long, straight, and jet black. She wears hoop earrings. She holds her hands out from her body, so we can see the fit of her handmade purple felt winter coat. It overlaps nicely in front, and the sleeves taper a bit. The coat is long enough to just cover her knees. She wears a pillbox hat, which is made of the exact same felt that the coat is made from. She carries a shiny purple satin purse with a satin ribbon strap. Behind her, in the background, is the Simplicity doll clothes pattern number 7601, from which this coat, hat, and purse combo have been made. A cone-shaped image expands from the pattern in the distance, showing us a close-up of the 1980's style Barbie dolls that modeled the same coat, hat, and a similar clutch purse, on the cover of the pattern envelope. These Barbies were Caucasian with wavy platinum blond hair. They look like they're chatting with each other as they walk along, holding their clutch purses out from their open coats. The ChellyWood.com logo appears in one corner of the image as a whole.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

If you’re just learning to sew, I recommend that you visit my “Helpful Tips” page. It offers lots of tutorial videos and links to sewing “basics” blog posts that I’ve done in the past.

To see more of my free doll clothes sewing tutorial videos, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, ChellyWood1.

Before I’m done here, I once again, want to thank the mom who contacted me quite some time ago, asking for directions on how to pin and cut doll clothes patterns. This series has been a lot of fun to make, and I’m so grateful for the question that inspired each of this week’s blog posts!

The image shows a woman who is bent over a cutting mat with large doll clothes patterns laid out on the cutting mat. Above her it says, "how to cut doll clothes sewing patterns". There's also a small pink stamp overlaid on top of the image, which says, "pin and cut" and the texts on either side of the woman say, "special thanks to the mom who reached out to me for help" (left of the image) and "I hope you get to read today's blog post" (to the right of the image).
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

If you’re new to my website, you probably haven’t heard about my Creative Spark class, “How to Alter Doll Clothes Patterns,” which teaches you how to alter (change) patterns. Did you notice that my Simplicity doll clothes pattern 7601 was made in the early 1990’s? 

Yes, these doll clothes patterns are out of style, but if you understand how to alter doll clothes patterns, you can make these garments look more like modern-day fashions.

Are you worried that you won’t have time to take a course in doll clothes pattern alteration? You’ll be happy to learn that, for any class on Creative Spark, you don’t have to follow a schedule. Just sign up when you’re ready.

It’s a one-time fee for the course, and there’s no specific time limit to finish your course. You can just take your time and learn at the pace that suits you. So please go have a look at my paid courses on Creative Spark, using this link.

Disclaimer/Credit/Affiliate Marketing Link:

*ChellyWood.com earns money by linking to JoAnn Fabrics, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online affiliate programs. Links provided above may be affiliate links. For a full list of my affiliate programs, and to understand how cookies are used to help this website earn money, please see my “Privacy Policy” page.

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, Vogue, 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.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.