Once again, I’ve been trying to tackle vintage Barbie doll clothes sewing pattern Advance 9939, and today I’m writing about the struggles I’ve had with the View 1 A-line skirt. It’s the pattern in the image above that does NOT have an arrow pointing toward it.

First, let me say that the instructions for making this skirt are sweet and adorable, but not particularly helpful. They keep referencing “Barbie’s Book,” which I’m sure is a booklet that gives a child who’s learning to sew, just a few basic concepts and definitions for basic sewing vocabulary terms. Since I know my basic sewing concepts, I’m probably not missing anything important by not following these supplemental instructions, but of course, I can’t be sure about that.

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In the image above, you can see how cute and sweet these little instructions are! Step 11, for example, says, “You’re in such good hands when you follow Barbie’s book, that we’ll ask you to turn to Page 6… ‘Hemming-Way’ and make the ‘regular hem.'”

I mean, how cute is that? Of course Earnest Hemingway, the author of The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and the Nick Adams stories, was a well-known celebrity in the early 1960’s, so the little play on words would be understood even by children, back when this pattern was published in 1961. I think it’s very clever!

Unfortunately, even though I carefully marked my pleats with a Dritz fabric pencil, followed all the directions to a T, and made sure my stitches were exactly 1/4 inch wide, as suggested on the pattern itself, I was doing my sewing at school (where I work as a librarian), not at home.

I don’t want you to think I’m shirking my duties as a librarian, so let me explain; I walk around hand stitching doll clothes while my 5th graders read with a partner. It keeps them on task but keeps me from interrupting them while they read. Over the 30 years I’ve spent as a teacher/librarian, I’ve found that this is a win-win situation. Teachers who sit at their desks and grade papers while their students read are destined to train kids to fake-read; whereas being present but uninvolved in their reading gives them lots of useful and honest reading practice time!

Anyway, I didn’t have a Barbie to try the skirt on as I sewed the pleats, so I was kind of stuck. After I’d finished sewing it, I thought, “That’s one tiny little waist, but hey, vintage Barbie had a true hourglass figure, so maybe…?”

When I got home and tried the skirt on my Barbie, this is what I discovered:

Nope! It definitely did not fit! I had hand-stitched red rickrack onto the bottom of it too, so I didn’t want to throw the whole thing away and start over. No thank you!

Now when I went back to look at what might have gone wrong, I realized that there were a couple of problems. First, I had been working with yet another half-pattern from someone who had cut her pattern down the middle (probably to share the other half with another sewist), and then I had cut the skirt pattern on a fold to make up for this discrepancy. So there’s that.

But frankly, that’s not enough to cause this much of a gap in the skirt. So during Round 2 of my Valentine’s Day skirt-making adventure, I decided to just draw my own pattern, using the original skirt pattern as a basic guide, but adding the needed millimeters that I could see this original skirt simply wasn’t offering.

Furthermore, even the original waistband pattern had to have been flawed, so I made my own waistband a whole lot longer. Of course I noted this on my hand-drawn waistband, so if I wanted to use it again in the future, it wouldn’t lead me down a path to a skirt that had a much-too-large waist instead.

My second time around, I skipped the rickrack, but I wasn’t at all disappointed by this. And based on the way the skirt is designed, I also decided it might be better to put a zipper in the back of this little A-line skirt, rather than a single snap (as was implied by the visual provided in the instructions) which left a bit of a gap at the top of the skirt where the sides of the skirt came together.

I really like how the bubble gum pink zipper looks in back, on the finished skirt! It may not be an “invisible” zipper, per se, but it adds Valentine’s Day pizzazz to the whole skirt, if you ask me…

When all was said and done, I ended up fitting the too-skinny skirt to a Monster High doll (which I gave to a child from the school where I work), but I kept the re-fitted, re-designed skirt made from my altered pattern because it really made a cute ensemble with the little double-breasted jacket from the View 1 business suit in the Advance 9939 set of doll clothes patterns, on my lovely Bubble Cut Barbie.

The pink blouse that my Bubble Cut Barbie wears in the far right photo is one of my own designs.

Has anyone else sewn the pleated skirt from View 1 of Advance 9939? And if so, did you also struggle to make the pleats work? Did the waistband turn out to be too small for your doll? Or am I working with an irreparably damaged pattern?

Let me know how it worked for you in the comments. Is it just me? Or is this pattern too small for a typical vintage Barbie?

I mean, I didn’t have to alter it a lot, but I definitely did have to alter it, in order to make it fit. But perhaps that’s because my original pattern had been cut — maybe not cut correctly — by the pattern’s previous owner! So I can’t deny that the damage to the original pattern could be to blame. The original waistband pattern had been cut in half too.

So I truly am curious… How many people have tried to make this Advance 9939 pattern View 1 skirt and discovered that it doesn’t actually fit Barbie? Am I the only one? I’m hoping to get some answers from comments from people like you!

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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.