Last summer my best friend’s grandmother made a special request. She brought me some eyelet from her daughter’s original wedding dress and shared a photo of her daughter on her wedding day.

Then she asked if I could create a similar dress for a doll. I gladly accepted the challenge, because dolly wedding dresses are just so much fun to make! YAY!

I was already familiar with Simplicity 8281’s wedding dress pattern, but it had been decades since I’d sewn it. However, looking at the photo of the actual bride, I knew this Simplicity 8281 wedding dress was similar in style, from the waist up, at least.

The actual bride’s skirt had four tiers though, and that was a little trickier to come by. But I had already designed a three-tier skirt — the one you see below — so I decided I would need to make one more tier to really do justice to the look-alike dress.

I took careful measurements.

Now I remind you, as part of the request, I had to work with a scrap of eyelet fabric from the original bride’s dress. If I messed up, I wouldn’t have any additional fabric to work with. So oh boy! This was an intense challenge!

I dug into my Simplicity 8281 envelope to see if I could use that bodice.  It should not have surprised me that part of the bodice pattern was missing. Ugh! The sleeve was in tact though, and it was the perfect sleeve for the 1970’s style of wedding dress that I was trying to imitate.

The sleeve pattern looked like it would produce a nice, full sleeve, but the original pattern’s instructions suggested adding lace to the end of the sleeve. So I knew I’d have to lengthen mine, if I wanted to use the eyelet.

In figure 1 above, you can see that I added about a centimeter and a half to the bottom of the sleeve, to make up for the fact that a.) the pattern allowed for only a single-fold hem although I intended to use a double-fold hem and b.) my sleeve’s ruffle would be made of the same eyelet as the dress, not an added-on lace ruffle.

Furthermore, I decided I would be wise to use my own bodice design for the upper part of the dress. You can see, in Figure 2 above, that the bodice front and back are printouts from one of my own pattern designs.

Why didn’t I just add the one bodice pattern piece that was missing from Simplicity 8281? Well, I had a good reason for this. When you mashup bodice patterns from two different bodice designs, sometimes the seams don’t match at the shoulders or under the arm.

Now Simplicity 8281 suggests adding the same lace ruffle that you’re supposed to attach at the wrists, to the neckline of the dress, and the neckline lace ruffle worked out really well, I think, as you can see in the image above. The bridal gown I was imitating had a similar ruffle around the neckline, and the ready-made lace ruffle made that step simple enough.

However the original bridal gown had very tiny ruffles of lace between the tiers of skirt, and this was tricky to create in miniature. If I had used the full-sized lace ruffle (the same lace from the neckline), it would have looked far too bulky for a Barbie-sized dress.

So instead, I trimmed the lace away from its gather binding. In the image below, you can see the spool of gathered lace in the upper left corner, and the trimmed version is what I’m holding up to the eyelet fabric, to measure its length.

This, of course, causes the ruffled lace to flatten out, but it provided a very nice scallop that would create the perfect in-between-tiers swatch of lace, very much like the original dress had.

Now, how did I make the four-tier skirt? I’ve found that if you are creating tiers, you want each tier to be longer (by at least and additional 1/3, if not more) than the tier above it. So I made some adaptations to my own three-tier skirt pattern, taping a couple of tiers together to form a fourth, even longer tier:

Between each of these pieces, I would sew on a swatch of the lace I’d cut free from its gathers. This would roughly imitate the four tiers of the original wedding dress, with its tiny ruffles in-between each tier.

Have a look:

The area I’ve labeled the “in-between ruffle” above is actually the same lace I used for the neck’s embellishment, but I’ve trimmed it so it’s a narrower strip of lace without the ruffle.

I have to say, quite honestly, that I wasn’t happy with the way the four tiers flared at the bottom of the dress, because the final product looked less like the four-tier skirt of the actual bride, simply because mine was so spread-out at the bottom.

The original dress didn’t look like this at the bottom. But what can I say? I think I’m too much of a perfectionist. Here’s a close-up of the bottom of the original dress, so you can compare the two:

Now remember, I’m using a tiny swatch of fabric from this original dress, to make my Barbie-sized bridal gown, so the little holes in this eyelet were quite large for a Barbie doll. I knew I would need to line my skirt, so the Barbie wouldn’t be exposing too much flesh beneath the bodice and at the hip.

Lining the bodice with a piece of solid cotton was easy enough, but I wasn’t sure what to do for a petticoat for the skirt.

In the long run, I ended up using the skirt pattern for the View 1 wedding dress from the original pattern, Simplicity 8281, which was just a straight skirt without any ruffles attached. It worked surprisingly well for this purpose.

I laid the pattern itself up against the half-moon-shaped finished four-tier skirt, to see if the two were compatible at the waist. I found that I did have to make adjustments to the fold, so that the two would match at the top of the skirt because the top of my four-tier eyelet skirt wasn’t quite as wide as the top of the Simplicity 8281 skirt.

And then finally, you’ll notice that there’s a little 1/4 inch navy blue ribbon tied in a bow at the front of the bride’s original dress. I thought about using 1/8 inch ribbon for my own dress, but when I laid 1/8 inch ribbon up against the Barbie-sized version of the real dress, I decided 1/8 inch ribbon looked out-of-scale for the Barbie version.

So instead, I used navy blue embroidery floss for my ribbons.

The beautiful bride in the original photo also had 1/4 inch ribbons tied at the ruffles of her sleeves, at the base of her bouquet, and around her bridal hat.

So once again, I used embroidery floss for these features on the Barbie-sized version of this wedding dress.

On the whole, I was very pleased with the way the project turned out, and my best friend’s grandmother, who ordered the dress, couldn’t have been happier with my attention to details.

So as promised, here’s what I’ve learned while making this bridal dress:

1. It helps to use a pattern you’re already familiar with, especially as a starting point. For me, this gave me the confidence I needed to start cutting up the fabric that I knew I had a limited quantity of.
2. If you’re going to make alterations, take careful measurements before you start.
3. Never try to mash-up bodice patterns, but you might be okay to swap one bodice for another, as long as the sleeve you plan to attach will work with the bodice you choose (and mine did because it was a gathered-at-the-top style of sleeve).
4. When the pattern calls for a ruffle attachment (like my sleeve did), you may need to lengthen the pattern to get it to fit correctly without the ruffle.
5. Even if you’re making alterations, follow the original pattern whenever possible (like I did when I attached a lace ruffle to my bodice’s neckline).
6. Lace ruffles can be trimmed to make them fit a Barbie-scale wedding dress, but gathered lace that’s trimmed will flatten out if you cut off the gathers.
7. If you are creating tiers for a skirt, you want each tier to be longer (by at least and additional 1/3, if not more) than the tier above it.
8. Tiers, on a Barbie-sized doll, will cause the bottom of a dress to flare, so keep this in mind.
9. When using eyelet fabric for a small doll’s dress, it’s a good idea to line the dress so the holes in the eyelet don’t expose too much skin on the doll.
10. Ribbon on an actual wedding dress can be imitated with embroidery floss on a Barbie-sized look-alike wedding dress, to make the “ribbon” suit the scale of the dress.

You’ll notice the hat my Barbie is wearing comes from last Thursday’s blog post. I designed that pattern especially for my best friend’s grandma’s special order.

I could say more about the bridal bouquet, but if you want to make a bouquet for your Barbie bride, I recommend visiting this blog post for a few tips and tricks!

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*Please note: when you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include Amazon, JoAnn Fabric, Etsy, and the eBay Partner Network. As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. To learn more about how my website uses affiliate marketing, please visit the website’s 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.