Isn’t this an adorable pattern? See the View A dress? Notice the layer of eyelet lace that serves as a top skirt? That’s going to be my focus.

Do you think the designer was trying to create an apron with that eyelet? Or do you think it’s just there to make the dress look lacy and feminine?

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I want to start with what I loved most about sewing the View A dress from McCall’s 6260. If you look at the instruction sheet above, you’ll see that the bodice for this dress is one single piece.

Back in May, I spent a little time teaching my niece, Emily, how to use the Janome Mini sewing machine, which I bought her for her birthday. And one of the easy-to-remember lessons I told her was, “The fewer pattern pieces an item of clothing has, the easier it will be to sew.”

And I hold true to that. A dress that has only three pattern pieces is going to be a breeze to sew, compared to one with with six or eight pattern pieces.

This dress’s bodice is also lined! Hooray for that!

Now, as you can see in the image above, I didn’t add the rickrack around the neck and arm holes, as the pattern’s instructions suggested. The instructions also called for eyelet lace to be used as the over-skirt instead of the swatch of Chantilly lace that you see above the pink gingham skirt that I’m in the process of hemming.

But I didn’t have any eyelet that was longer than one inch, and I thought a one-inch eyelet “overskirt” would look weird. So I did my own thing (made a slight alteration) and switched from eyelet to Chantilly lace.

I believe the lace is supposed to look something like an apron. Back in the 1960’s, when McCall’s 6260 was first produced, women often wore aprons. I remember both my grandma and my mother wearing aprons.

And my aunt Virginia too. In fact, most of the ladies I knew in the 1970’s wore aprons when they worked in the kitchen.

And while aprons are still worn in professional kitchens (restaurants, cafes, and bars), I don’t know many women who wear them in their home kitchens today. Do you?

I mean, I do wear one when I’m baking, but not usually when I’m cooking dinner.

So when I made the McCall’s 6260 View A dress, I really thought about this. Would a modern-day girl want an apron for her Barbie doll? And if not, what would she want? Just a pink gingham dress with no frills?

I decided a modern girl would probably love any dress that has Chantilly lace. Girls loved lace when I was a kid, and as far as I can tell, they still love to play with lace dresses today.

In fact, when I was a girl, I always kept a swatch of lace in my Barbie doll case with the clothing items and little swirly hangers. Remember the little plastic swirly hangers?

My swatch of lace was used as a wedding veil, an overlay skirt, a funky hat, kitchen curtains, a baby bonnet, a grandmother’s shawl, and anything else I could think of!

So I added the swatch of lace as an overlay skirt, but I sort of wished I’d just gathered it, sewn a length of bias tape over the gathers, and created more of a true apron — one that came off the dress and could be tied back onto the dress — because I think that would have allowed the little girl who received this dress to play with the lace by itself, in all the creative ways that I used to play with lace.

And now that I’ve finished making this dress, there are other things I don’t particularly like about the view A dress from McCall’s 6260.

As you can see in the images above, the bodice doesn’t fit the doll very well. Granted, these images show the dress on a modern Barbie rather than a vintage one, but I found that it wasn’t snug around the waist for my vintage Barbie either.

So if I were to make this dress over again, I’d probably use my own pattern — the one you see above specifically — so I could be sure the bodice would fit the doll nicely. It’s actually a very similar pattern.

I think pink gingham fabric is super cute, and it’s a wonderful fabric for Valentine’s Day. So I may make another dress like the McCall’s 6260, using my own dress pattern with the pink gingham, as we move into February. I’m running out of time, so we’ll see whether or not that project ever gets done.

But I wouldn’t make the lace overlay. I’d make more of a true apron — a detachable one — rather than an overlay skirt that’s sewn into the dress. There’s just so much more potential for imaginative play with a detachable lace apron!

Question: When you were a kid, did you keep a piece of lace in your stash of Barbie clothes so you could use it for shawls and veils and curtains and things? Or was that just a “me” thing? 

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