According to Wikipedia, “In sewing, a tuck is a fold or pleat in fabric that is sewn or fastened in place.”* It goes on to explain that pintucks are tiny tucks. They’re certainly right about that. The key word is TINY.
But there’s a LOT Wikipedia doesn’t tell you about pintucks, and now that I’ve learned a thing or two about pintucks while sewing the View A dress (shown above) for a vintage Francie doll, I’m going to share my pintuck lessons with you.
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Today’s pintuck project comes from the View A dress pattern in the McCall’s 8531 doll clothes pattern envelope, which is designed to fit a vintage Francie doll. At least, that’s what I assumed, since Francie was named on the pattern envelope!
I don’t know if you can read the instructions on that visual image from the pattern’s instruction page (above), so let’s make sure we understand what it says: “Step 1: Using a ruler, lightly pencil lines for tucks and ‘Hemlines’ on OUTSIDE of fabric for DRESS A, as indicated on pattern.”
Okay. Fair enough. I could follow those directions without any issues. Here’s what I ended up with:
This part of the project took a lot of chalk from my mechanical Dritz chalk pencil. That’s why it shows up in both pink and green chalk — I actually ran out of chalk while I worked on marking this rectangle of fabric!
I moved on to the next bit of instruction.
“Crease on outside along these lines…”
Yes. Okay. I understand how to crease the fabric; it’s just a quick fold and press. Got it. Done.
Then I read this: “… stitching back ‘Hemlines’ from top as far as lower ends of tucks.”
I studied the diagram. There was a long pause. Huh?
What do they mean by “back ‘Hemlines?'” I didn’t have the foggiest idea.
To me, a hemline is the bottom of the dress, where you hem the skirt. Or, if you’re making a back closure or neckline, you can talk about the edges of the garment as having a hemline. So this was super confusing. Did they mean the back closure’s hemline?
I went to my old friend, Professor Pincushion on YouTube to see what the instructions were talking about in the McCall’s pattern. Her video gave me some pintuck basics, but I didn’t like how both Professor Pincushion and the McCall’s pattern suggested that we use our fabric pencil on the OUTSIDE of the fabric.
I mean, these are doll clothes. You don’t typically wash doll clothes because dolls don’t sweat, whereas people do. So was there a way to create pintucks without placing all your chalk marks on the outside?
It took me quite a bit of researching, but I found an Eastern European lady on a channel called Global Fashion Workshop, who seemed to know exactly how this could be done. I’m going to embed her tutorial below so you can see the way she made pintucks without leaving marks on the outside of the garment:
Now I understood that I could baste along the drawn lines, press, stitch, and then remove the baste stitch.
From the wrong side, my baste stitch looked like this:
From the right side (the outside of the garment), my baste was visible, but my chalk marks were not. So this was perfect!
Professor Pincushion suggested that I could space my pintucks as far apart or as close together as I wanted, so I washed, ironed, and pressed my fabric to get rid of the first set of pintuck pencil marks. I then re-drew my pattern with the pintucks a little farther apart.
Even though I’d spaced my pintucks farther apart than the original pattern had suggested, when I got to pintuck #10, I did a little math and realized that, at the rate I was going, I would not be able to work with the dress pattern that was waiting in my McCall’s 8531 pattern envelope!
So at that point, I decided to sew another swatch of yellow fabric onto what I already had, and continue to make pintucks until I could fit the pattern onto the pintucked fabric.
Because of this, if you’re making the View A pintuck dress from McCall’s 8531, start with A LOT more fabric than what they suggest on the pattern guide. A LOT.
I’ve written almost a thousand words in today’s blog post, so you’ll have to come back next week to see how the whole thing turned out! (Sorry everybody.)
Questions: Do you ever struggle with the wording in a sewing pattern’s written instructions? And if you do, what sewing terms throw you for a loop? How do you cope — what’s your “go to” resource — when you don’t understand the instructions?
Please leave your comments in the section at the bottom of this page.
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*Wikipedia contributors. “Tuck (sewing).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2 Dec. 2022. Web. 22 Nov. 2025.
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Actually, doll clothes do need washing once in a while. Dolls don’t sweat, it’s true, but their clothes are handled by little fingers that do, or fingers that aren’t always exactly clean. You should see what my 5-year-old niece does to her dolls’ clothes.
And I had to wash my dolls’ clothes and hair after a house renovation, because they got really dusty.
And not that I’ve ever sewn any kind of tuck, my sewing level is still the kind that uniform pleats are a challenge, but I read in some pattern guide (my mother sews and my grandmothers sewed, so I’ve always been in contact with how clothes are made) the instruction to make the pintucks before cutting the fabric, because you never know how much fabric you’ll need until you’ve made them.
So I am a beginner sewist that is very picky about well-made clothes, and turn them inside out in the fitting room looking for mistakes, bad finishes, loose threads…
Besides, Barbie (and my mother) taught me basic hand sewing as a girl, so I never had to look for a straight stitch, whipstitch, backstich, how to hem a garment by hand or even a ladder stitch tutorial. I just don’t know where to start a sewing machine.
But I’ll get there.
Debbie
Thank you for your input, Débora. When it comes to sticky fingers playing with doll clothes, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes they DO need to be washed.