Interviews With Crafters, Tutorials: Sewing Basics

Helpful Tips and FAQ’s for People Who Love to Sew for Dolls #DollClothes #SewingTips

In this photo, an 18 inch Best Friends Club doll sits at a toy-sized sewing machine. Beside her sewing table is an empty dress form. She wears handmade doll clothes. The logo at the bottom of the page says, Chelly Wood dot com, which is a website where you can find free printable PDF sewing patterns for dolls of many shapes and all different sizes. This image accompanies an FAQ's page that offers many tips and tricks, specifically for people who love to sew doll clothes.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for dolls of many shapes and sizes.

It has been about six years since I published my “Frequently Asked Questions” page (i.e. FAQ’s), and since I’m doing a series of re-posts while I take time off from creating new blog content, I thought you might enjoy learning what the little flowers mean on my patterns, and why the flowers are sometimes pink and sometimes purple.

You may have noticed that the flowers have changed colors over time. You can tell how old my patterns are by the colors of the flowers on them.

Now this doesn’t seem related, but actually it is… My oldest daughter graduated from Idaho State University recently with a college degree in marketing.

Here we see an image of the real doll clothing designer, Chelly Wood, together with her two daughters and her husband. One of her daughters wears graduation robes and a graduation cap. The overlying text says, "My family."
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

While she was in college, my oldest daughter helped me re-organize this website, and she designed a new logo for ChellyWood LLC (the official business for ChellyWood.com). With this new logo design, I re-designed the flowers to match the new logo’s color scheme.

The image shows the Difficulty Scale for Chelly's flowers. These are purple flowers with turquoise blue center. Lowest on the difficulty scale is a single flower. The most difficult projects have five flowers.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

However my older patterns still use the pink flowers. These old patterns may date back to the earlier days, when this website was just beginning to gain followers, and some of my oldest patterns may even be hand-drawn (rather than created on a computer).

Regardless of which color the flowers are, they still mean the same thing.

The flowers on my patterns are used as a difficulty scale. Here’s what you need to know in order to create the project that has been marked with…

This sewing tutorial and/or pattern uses little or no actual sewing. It may require the use of felt fabric, which doesn’t need to be hemmed. It may use traditional glue, safety pins, or hot glue. If any sewing is involved, it will be a straight stitch only. You may need to know how to print my patterns for older projects, but any single-flower projects are for absolute beginners, little kids who are learning to sew, and those folks who don’t like to sew at all.

This sewing tutorial and/or pattern will require knowledge of some of the concepts bulleted below too…

This sewing tutorial and/or pattern will require knowledge of all of the above bulleted items, in addition to any of the following

This sewing tutorial and/or pattern will require knowledge of all of the above bulleted items, plus a few more concepts like…

This sewing tutorial and/or pattern will require knowledge of all of the above bulleted items, plus some additional concepts like…

Today’s blog post is a re-post. To understand why Chelly Wood is taking some time off, reposting older blog topics, revisit the end-of-March blog post entitled, “There’s a cat in my sewing room!”

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