Did you know you could purchase patterns for Skipper and Barbie that match? Yup!

I bought my Vogue 9964 pattern for vintage Skipper and vintage Barbie back when it first came out, in 1999. I made all of the outfits pictured on the envelope, and I can tell you that it’s not my favorite pattern. Why not?

Well the purse is easy enough to make, but I wasn’t a fan of the “sailor suit” dresses. I remember struggling with them a lot. The pants are easy to make, but the shirts were kind of a weird design, having a sleeve cuff but no collar, and a strange front-flap opening that overlapped the chest in an odd way.

The dresses from Views E and F (shown above) were, by far, my favorite of the patterns from this Vogue 9964 doll clothes sewing pattern. It looks like both dresses open in the front, but that’s more of a faux opening.

They are designed to have a front flap, but for the actual closure mechanism, they snap up the back, which in my opinion, is a far more useful way to dress these dolls. As the Vogue Craft pattern 9964 shows, these patterns are designed to fit vintage Barbies and vintage Skipper dolls.

I’ve recently purchased a 2019 preproduction version of Simplicity’s 5785 for vintage Barbies. Take a look at these outfits and see if they don’t remind you of some patterns I’ve recently blogged about for Skipper:

See that black and white ball gown? Guess what that reminds me of…

You guessed it, the recent red and white ball gown that I made for vintage Skipper:

This pattern, my vintage Skipper 5861 wardrobe pattern, actually matches the Simplicity 5785 repro pattern for vintage Barbie in many ways.

They both have the swing coat with scarf; they both have the sleeveless black and white gingham circle skirt dress with a red bolero jacket; and both patterns have similar pleated skirt sets with a yellow V-neck top.

But there’s something I should say about my reproduction Simplicity 5785 pattern…

If you want to buy the original pattern for the vintage Barbie wardrobe, you’ll want to search for Simplicity 4700. When they reproduced it, I guess they changed the number!

The Simplicity 5785 is much easier to find in “factory folded” condition, and easy-peasy to find cut with all the pieces, whereas the Simplicity 4700 is much harder to come by in good condition with all the patterns in tact. Oddly enough, they appear to be the same pattern, but one dates back to the 1960’s (the rarer one) while the reproduction was — well, mine anyway — was made in 2019.

I have one more Skipper-and-Barbie matchy-matchy pattern to mention in this blog post. For Barbie, it’s Simplicity 5673.

In the larger View 1 image from Simplicity 5673, we see Barbie wearing what appears to be the same exact jumper with collared shirt that Skipper wears in View 1 of Simplicity 5861, but take a closer look at these two…

The Skipper outfit has a red and white striped shirt with a collar, while the Barbie outfit is actually a double-layered dress of sorts.

So while these two patterns are similar, with the dropped-waist jumper under a collared garment that has three-quarter length sleeves, they don’t match exactly, in terms of their components.

Still, I consider them a possible matching set because how hard would it be to either lengthen the Skipper version of the collared shirt? Or how hard would it be to shorten the Barbie shirt dress into a shirt?

Before I go, I want to ask… Do you know of any other Skipper-and-Barbie matching pattern sets? Or maybe you’ve made matching outfits for Wellie Wishers and American girl? Or Velvet and Crissy? If you’ve made your dolls matching outfits, what pattern maker and number did you use?

Once you had made your dolls matching outfits, what were your thoughts? Do you have a favorite pattern for making matching outfits? Is there a matching set of patterns that you didn’t enjoy putting together? What were your struggles?

Please leave your own Barbie-Skipper (or other doll pairs) matching pattern ideas in the comments below. I love to hear from my followers and friends!

If you’re not sure how to lengthen or shorten a doll’s garment (like I was suggesting when I talked about the shirt dress vs. the collared shirt in Simplicity patterns 5673 and 5861 respectively), please read about my “Doll clothes pattern alterations” course below.

If you enjoyed this blog post, and you’d like to see my videos, you might want to navigate over to my YouTube channel, ChellyWood1 to look through my playlists.

If you would like to make a donation to this free doll clothes pattern website, please click here. There’s also a “Donate” button in the main menu.

For anyone who would like to expand their dolls’ wardrobes, you should really check out my “How to Alter Doll Clothes Patterns” course and my “Design Your Own Doll Pants Patterns from Scratch” classes on the Creative Spark online learning platform. Here’s my bio page on their website, where you can learn more.

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 go check out my paid courses on Creative Spark, using this link.

As always, feel free to pin, like, or tweet about my free patterns and tutorials.

To read more about my free sewing patterns and tutorials, please visit the “Helpful Tips” page.

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Chelly Wood and the ChellyWood.com website are not affiliated with any of the doll or toy companies mentioned in this blog post, but Chelly enjoys designing her doll clothes to fit a variety of dolls. To learn more about the doll companies mentioned in today’s post, please visit the doll or toy company’s website.