It might surprise you to learn that of all the handmade Ken clothing items shown in the image above, the last thing I finished sewing was Ken’s shirt. Why?

There was a mishap with the facing! So today’s blog post is about facings, and in particular, how sewing a facing on doll clothes is a little different from sewing facings on people’s clothes.

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I think of a facing as a sort of incomplete or miniature version of a lining. We’ll start by having a look at a blouse from my Advance 2896 vintage doll clothes sewing pattern for Barbie, to see how a very basic facing works.

So if you look at the image above, Blouse Piece E is the shirt, and Facing F sort of matches Blouse Piece E, along the front closure (where the blouse says “snap-snap-snap” and “button-button-button”). That horseshoe-shaped hole at the neckline of the blouse matches the horseshoe-shaped hole in the neckline of the facing because you would sew the facing into that neckline, forming something similar to a lining, but without filling up the entire inside of the blouse when you’re done.

So what you’d get is this:

Look again at that pink blouse image above. Notice how the raw edges of the facing are completely unfinished because I’m going to talk about that a little later in this blog post.

But first, let’s talk about the sleeves.

We could have added yet another facing to create the little sleeves on that inside-out pink shirt, but instead, the designer decided it was good enough to just clip the shirt at the underarms and fold the fabric back for a single-fold hem at the sleeve area.

A lot of shirt patterns for human people do offer both a facing for the neckline and another facing for the sleeve, but when we make clothes for dolls, designers are less concerned about perfection, I suppose.

Or maybe designers still think of doll clothes as something children make, so keeping it simple is key.

That was clearly the case, back when Advance 2896 was made, as you can see in the image above where it has the heading, “How to sew for YOUR doll.” The instructions are super cutesy, written for an audience of young children who are learning how to sew.

The end result for my Advance 2896 View 3 blouse turned out okay, but in my humble opinion, it’s not fabulous. You can read more about this pattern and its problematic issues here and here.

In brief, I found that it looked better on the doll backwards than it did when I put it on the doll with the snaps in back (the way the designer wanted it to be worn). This was due, in part, to the blouse’s over-simplified construction.

When we sew human people’s clothes using a facing, it’s usually advised to “finish” that rough edge running along the inside of the garment after we’ve attached the facing, but because we don’t have to wash dolls’ clothes, most of the patterns I’ve run across don’t recommend anything special for “finishing” the seams of a tiny facing on a garment like Barbie’s View 3 top from Advance 2896.

So I was pleasantly surprised when my vintage Ken doll’s Advance 2899‘s instructions for making a formal collared shirt suggested a more finished look to the shirt’s facing along the collar’s edge and the front closure of the View 2 shirt.

But what I really want you to notice in these next images is the shape of a shirt’s facing. As you can see, Ken’s shirt’s facing in the Advance 2899 pattern has a slightly different shape than Barbie’s shirt’s facing in Advance 2896:

The original owner of my Advance 2899 pattern for vintage Ken had pinned the pattern pieces inside the tissue paper instruction sheet. But as part of this pinned-together pattern set, pattern piece K appeared to be missing. Later, I found it pinned together with the pieces for the View 1 jacket.

So when I cut out my shirt pieces, I actually cut 2 of pattern piece J, which is why I wrote “cut 2” in pencil on Facing J. Then, when I located pattern piece K among the jacket pieces, I compared the piece of white fabric I’d already cut out, to make sure it matched the shape of pattern piece K — and it did (as you can see in Figure 5 above). Then I went back and crossed out the words “cut 2,” which I’d written on Facing J.

But that’s not why I sewed the jacket first. I actually tried to sew the shirt first, and I didn’t get frustrated enough to put it down for a while until I encountered this problem (a problem that’s really common when you sew facings into dolls’ clothes):

In Figure seven above, you can see where the facing will be sewn to the front part of the garment, sandwiching it in-between the collar and the shirt. That seems easy enough, but as you can see in Figure nine, I didn’t give myself a full 1/4 inch seam allowance when joining the two facings at the top notch, which left a wonky chunk of facing sticking out funny under the collar. Due to the tiny seams we use, this is a common problem in doll clothes construction, so I let it go and moved on.

I read through the instruction page, which said, “Press under 1/4 inch on curved unnotched edge of facing and stitch close to edge…” These instructions seemed to suggest hemming the rough inner edge of the facing before you stitch it to the shirt, but I was afraid I’d get confused and hem the wrong part of the facing. So instead, I first stitched the facing to the shirt, then hemmed.

This did not prevent the problem you see in Figure eight though: I was supposed to stitch the bottom part of the facing to the bottom part of the shirt front, but instead, I hemmed the bottom part of the facing. So I took out my handy-dandy seam ripper, ripped the hem apart, but instead of starting over, I put the shirt aside and made the jacket.

You may recall that when I made the jacket, I gave myself extra fabric to work with (see the purple Figure 4 above) when cutting out the jacket’s facings. And as you can see in Figure 5 above, even though I had planned to fit that facing EXACTLY to the jacket and trim away the excess fabric when done, it still had that wonky wave in the collar area when complete.

So setting the shirt aside to work on the jacket didn’t make things go any better.

What’s the moral to this story?

I HATE sewing facings on dolls’ clothes!

When you’re working with a teeny tiny object, like a Barbie shirt or a Ken jacket, it’s SO much easier to just line the dang thing! Oy yoy YOY!

Today, when I see a facing in a doll clothes pattern, I always think about swapping it out for a lining. In fact, when I re-created the pink Barbie shirt from Advance 2896, that’s exactly what I did.

And as you can see in the image on the right above, the lined version of the shirt turned out a LOT better!

The next time I make Ken’s shirt and jacket from Advance 2899, I’m definitely going to use a lining instead of a facing!

And what are your opinions on facings? Do you have any tricks or tips that can help sewists who try to stick to the original pattern and its construction of a facing? Please leave a comment!

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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, 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.