Fabric, Jem and the Holograms, Old Patterns from Chelly's Collection, Sewing and Fashion History, Tips for Beginners, Vintage Barbie

Tips and Tricks for Making Doll Underwear for Jem and the Holograms! #Jem #80sToys

The Advance 9939 vintage Barbie doll clothes sewing patterns are shown in close-up. View 1 shows a yellow business suit with a double-breasted coat and A-line skirt; view 2 shows blue plaid culottes with a solid blue sleeveless top; view 3 shows a red evening dress with below-the-knee pencil skirt and 1960's style thick collar; view 4 shows an ice skater's flouncy skirt and long-sleeved top in solid bright blue fabric; view 5 shows a shirt and skirt that look deceptively like a light blue shirtwaist dress but are actually separates; view 6 shows a yellow cape with arm holes (below the knee length), and the drawing also shows a pillbox hat with it.
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.

If you’re already familiar with Advance 9939, you may say to yourself, “Wait, that’s a Barbie pattern, not a Jem and the Holograms pattern.”

Well the underpants pattern from Advance 9939 doesn’t fit Jem, but the bloomers pattern does! Go back to read about the sewing vocabulary definition for bloomers, which I posted on October 22nd, and you will begin to understand that one person’s bloomers is another person’s underpants!

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Left: a vintage Barbie models a pair of blue bloomers or underpants from the back, where they have a seam down the middle back. Center, Jem, of the doll series "Jem and the Holograms" models the bloomers and the ice skater's blue shirt from Advance 9939. right, we see the same bloomers on a vintage Barbie from the front, and here we can tell that the bloomers snap in front.
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.

The images above show the bloomers from the Advance 9939 vintage Barbie doll clothes sewing pattern, and the shirt that Jem is modeling with these bloomers is the ice skater’s skirt from Advance 9939‘s View 4 doll clothes outfit.

I was pretty excited to discover that Jem — a doll with a very different body from my vintage Barbie — could wear both the bloomers and the shirt from the ice skater’s set.

Of course the waistband of the ice skater’s skirt didn’t fit her, but…

On a purple polka dot background (having purple cotton with tiny white polka dots), two photos surround the Chelly Wood dot com logo. The top photo shows a green cutting board (for fabric cutting) upon which lies a graph paper cut-out of a doll's waistband. Over the top of the graph paper draft lies the original waistband, which has actually been cut in half, but with a little deductive reasoning, we can tell that before someone sliced the waistband pattern in half, it used to say "Waistband C: use 1/4 inch seam allowance." It should also be noted that about one half inch of extra graph paper has been tacked onto the original length of the waistband. The bottom photo shows a doll wearing the ice skater's outfit form Advance 9939, shown from the back with a close-up on the garment's waistband closure. The waistband is extra long and has two snap (popper) fasteners, with one exposed. Again, deductive reasoning tells us that the person who dressed this doll very likely chose to use the snap extender to fit the skirt on the doll properly, with the shirt tucked inside the waistband.
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.

But waistbands are easily adjusted. In fact the image above shows how I adjusted the waistband to make sure it would fit Tammy. Jem’s waist is even bigger than Tammy’s though. I would have to extend the waistband even further to make the skirt fit Jem.

However in my humble opinion, the real “gem” (yes, that was a purposeful play on words) was the fact that the bloomers did, in fact, fit Jem! Because honestly, how hard would it be to make a pair of underpants for Jem, using the bloomers pattern from Advance 9939? It would be easy-peasy!

A section of the instructions for Advance 9939 for vintage Barbie is presented here, with three diagrams and two paragraphs of instructions. The three diagrams show the following: (left) a rectangle of fabric has been folded (like a taco) and stitched from the X to the bottom of garment; (center) the same rectangle has been hemmed and given a single-folded casing; (right) elastic has been sent through the casing, but also a pair of snaps (poppers) have been sewn where the elastic opens, just above the area marked X in the right-hand diagram. The text reads as follows: (Heading) Panties Piece G... 28. Let us really finish our little outfit by making little panties which match or, from bits of lace or embroidered edging which Mother may have handy. Just be sure the piece is as large as the pantie pattern. (Second paragraph...) Let "Barbie's Sewing Book" tell you exactly how to make them, on page 8. stitching from cut edge of hem to cross on center back and matching notches 8.
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.

There is a “panties” pattern that comes with Advance 9939, even though it doesn’t appear in the envelope’s front view.

However, when I followed the instruction sheet you see pictured above, I wasn’t impressed. I mean, really read through those instructions…

Figure 7 shows what looks like a pair of shorts turned on their side. At the crotch, a little indentation brings them together, leaving the leg holes open. The indentation is shaped like a V in the fabric. Figure 8 shows the shorts held sideways by the woman, with an arrow pointing at the elastic waist. Figure 9 shows the same shorts on a blond, bubble cut Barbie, and the doll is facing away from us, so we can see how the shorts fit in the back. The arrow for Figure 9 points at a very obvious wrinkle in the shorts, which starts at the crotch and winds up at a 45 degree angle, almost to the elastic waists.
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.

Uh… yeah. It wasn’t my favorite panties pattern, as you can see. It was really just a way-too-short miniskirt that had been brought together and knotted at the crotch.

But the bloomers! Well, that was a different story. And now that I knew they’d fit Jem, I was imagining them in striped jersey fabric, maybe stretch lace, or even animal print fabric!

I knew they could fit Tammy and vintage Barbie, but now that I knew they also fit Jem, well, that was a real jackpot!

A top and bottom photo surround a central Chelly Wood dot com logo. The top photo shows a woman's hand holding up the pattern for the bloomers for the ice skating outfit found in view 4 of the Advance 9939 vintage Barbie patterns. Behind the woman's hand, we see that she has used this single pattern to cut out two shorts-like bloomers, and with a fabric pencil, she has marked darts atop the shorts/bloomers garment pieces. In the lower photo, we see that the darts have been sewn, giving the shorts (now worn by a doll) an hourglass curve that allots extra room for the doll's hips. We can also see that the fullness of the doll's behind is accommodated by elastic around the top of the doll's thighs. With a second glance at the top photo, we can see that the shorts/bloomers pattern actually does have a line for a casing at the bottom of the pattern, where elastic will be sewn in.
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.

Questions: Did any of you have a Jem doll? Were you frustrated when she couldn’t fit into some of your favorite Barbie outfits? Have you ever tried sewing for Jem? And if so, do you have any additional patterns you can recommend for Jem and the Holograms?

This image of a turquoise blue sewing needle pulling purple thread away from a line of cross-stitching is used as a divider between sections of a blog post.

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This image shows four rows of artist's renderings of doll clothing items. The top row shows four different styles of pants. The second row shows four different styles of shirts. The third row shows four different styles of skirts. The fourth row shows four different styles of dresses, with skirts in long, short, and mid-length styles. The text reads at the top, "Classes in Doll Clothing Design" followed by this paragraph: "Have you ever wished you could create patterns of your own? Click on the links to Chelly's online courses below, to learn more about her paid courses in doll clothing pattern design techniques."

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7 thoughts on “Tips and Tricks for Making Doll Underwear for Jem and the Holograms! #Jem #80sToys”

  1. Hi, Chelly!
    Here in Brazil, the Jem And The Holograms cartoon was shown on the SBT television channel between 1988 and 1992, but Hasbro neither brought nor licensed the dolls here. Lots of kids took the series for a Barbie And The Rockers’ one. It was very successful, in spite the channel didn’t acquire all the episodes, which made the story a little difficult to understand (at least in my opinion as a child). To give you an idea, the first episode of the 1st season was shown, and the next episode available to us was the 6th, “Starbright: Part 1: Falling Star”. Then “Starbright: Part 3: Rising Star” would air, without us knowing what had happened in part 2, and so on. The last available episode of the last season was “The Day the Music Died”. Thus, we never found out if Jerrica found her father, or how she did it. This habit of not buying all the episodes of an animated series was common among Brazilian television channels. It was said that it was to kind of “testing the waters” before investing in a full series, but no matter how successful the cartoon was, the other episodes never came.
    So, pretty much nobody ever had a Jem doll around here.

    Reply

      1. Oh, don’t feel bad for us. We didn’t even know the dolls from the series existed at the time, so we didn’t miss them.

  2. Regarding these so-called panties, this is a pattern that I found quite strange. It even manages to look bad on Barbie, which is difficult. Look how the stitches used to form the crotch pull all the fabric down. These panties would go into Barbie’s hm, crack, if she had one 😊. But the same technique can be used to make “boy shorts” style panties for a doll, using two-ways stretch fabric or a sock, which I prefer, cause so we can upcycle odd socks.

    Reply

    1. I also like to upcycle, and yes, I think a jersey fabric might have worked better for these. But I had already made the rest of the outfit from the solid blue cotton, so I went ahead and made the underpants from the same cotton.

      Reply

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