Crafts and Hobbies, Interviews With Crafters, Sewing Chat, Tips for Beginners, Tutorials: Sewing Basics

Do you have any questions you would like Chelly Wood to answer in a future blog post? Please join the #SewingChat !

On a blue linen background, someone has sewn a white circular patch into the center of it, using hot pink or red thread. Swirly stitches surround it, as do loose buttons. The text inside the white patch reads, "How do you develop your sewing style?"
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Today I’m going to address the fifth and final question from Kim, one of my followers who is learning to sew. In my email dialog with Kim, she asked a number of questions about learning to sew, and specifically learning to design her own doll clothes. Her questions delved into whether the paid courses I offer are going to help her in her quest to design her own patterns, or whether it might be a waste of her money, due to the fact that she’s pretty new to sewing.

But before you navigate away, please consider leaving a question of your own in the “Comments” section at the bottom of today’s blog post. Is there anything you struggle with, when it comes to sewing doll clothes?

A little girl hugs her grandmother. The text reads "Best grandma ever."
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable sewing patterns for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Are there any tips you wish your grandma could give you, even though she’s perhaps not around to give you the help you need? (I feel that way sometimes…)

I would love to get additional blog topics to talk about on my website, so please consider leaving a question in the comments section today!

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Inside a purple frame, talk bubbles express Q for Questions and A for Answers. The text reads, "Sewing tips for beginners." This is a thumbnail for a Q and A blog post for beginners who are learning to sew and want to "pick the brain" of an experienced doll clothing designer, Chelly Wood.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Here’s Kim’s Question #5: “How can I be able to put my own ideas of style together without needing someone to hold my hands each and every time I have a certain style of my choice in mind?”

Here’s my response:

The answer to this question is simple: practice makes perfect.
A banner states "practice makes perfect" on a series of colorful turquoise blue and purple blocks, inter-woven with photos of people sewing both by hand and on a sewing machine.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.
It may seem like I’m about to go off-topic, but just bare with me for a minute. Have you ever noticed the line of flowers on my doll clothes patterns? This is meant to be a difficulty scale…
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.
One flower means it’s a super easy pattern. These patterns may require the use of felt fabric, which doesn’t need to be hemmed. The one-flower patterns may use traditional glue, safety pins, or hot glue. If any sewing is involved, it will be a straight stitch only.
The image shows one pink flower on a white background and it says "difficulty level: super easy!"
Two flowers means this sewing project will require these basic sewing skills:
This image shows a pants pattern and a shorts pattern on a single page in the form of a PDF. These are doll clothes patterns, and the heading at the top of the image says, "Free sewing pattern for doll pants and shorts." Pictured on the image are photos of a Rainbow High 10 inch doll wearing the shorts and pants with two different tops. These doll clothes patterns are marked with the logo for ChellyWood.com and they are stamped with a Creative Commons Attribution mark. They have been given three purple flowers to indicate the difficulty scale for this doll pants pattern / doll shorts patterns.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Three flowers means you’ll need to be able to do all of the above PLUS you’ll need to know:

On an old wooden surface (perhaps a wooden table) rests a pair of rusty old sewing scissors, a wooden spool containing threads in two different shades of pink, and a more modern-looking cardboard spool of pink rick rack trim. The rick rack trim is quite narrow, perhaps 1/8 of an inch or 3 millimeters wide. The pale pink rick rack trim is a sort of braided trim that zig zags, due to the way it has been made.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.
I recommend setting a goal to learn how to do each of the sewing techniques above before you take my “How to Design Your Own Doll Clothes Sewing Patterns” course. The flowers go on from there, to include four-flower and five-flower difficulty levels. You can read about each level on my FAQ’s page.
The image shows a laptop computer beside someone's hand-drawn doll clothes sewing patterns. The text reads "classes." Click on this button to learn more about the classes Chelly Wood teaches.
But to make the most out of my class, you really should have the fundamentals of sewing down, in order to design your own, more advanced patterns, using the skills you can learn from me in my doll clothing design course. Maybe set a goal for the New Year, to learn each of these techniques by 2026…? Then reward yourself with my class for having achieved the goal!
The image shows the Chelly Wood doll (really a Spin Master Liv doll that has had her hair died and her face repainted to look like the real doll clothing designer, Chelly Wood) staring at the camera over the top of her lowered glasses. The photo is superimposed over a swatch of turquoise blue linen fabric with the word "hashtag goals" over the top of the photo. In the lower left corner, we see the ChellyWood.com logo.
Please visit ChellyWood.com for free printable PDF sewing patterns and tutorial videos for making doll clothes to fit dolls of many shapes and all different sizes.

Okay doll clothes sewing enthusiasts, fans, and followers out there… what are your questions? Please consider leaving one or more questions in the comments section, so I can address your questions in future blog posts!

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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.

Chelly Wood teaches classes on the  Creative Spark, online learning platform. Please click that link to learn more.

Disclaimer/Credit/Affiliate Marketing Link:

*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 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.

2 thoughts on “Do you have any questions you would like Chelly Wood to answer in a future blog post? Please join the #SewingChat !”

    1. Hi Susan. Yeah, I can give you a couple of tips…

      First, instead of pressing your seams so they’re flat, if you’re right handed, you can press the seams to the left before you sew the casing. (If you’re left-handed, you probably start pushing your safety pin through from the left side of the casing — while looking at the wrong side of the garment — which means you’d be wiser to press the seams to the right before you sew the casing.)

      However I don’t think this looks as nice from the outside. It makes it easier to send the safety pin through the casing, but it leaves your garment looking lumpy where the seams are, especially if the garment is close-fitting.

      So the second way to work with the safety pin inside the casing is this: turn the safety pin sideways as you try to push past the seams.

      This is a great question! I think I will address this in a future blog post, but meanwhile, I wanted to answer your question right here, as it’s a fairly simple response to the question.

      Reply

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