History and Research, Holiday Crafts, Old Patterns from Chelly's Collection, Sewing and Fashion History, Stacie Patterns, Tips for Beginners, Vintage Skipper

Altering a shirt from Simplicity 5861 to make Mary McLeod Bethune’s students’ blouses #BlackHistoryMonth #SewWithMe

https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_04013/?r=-0.287,-0.082,1.477,0.715,0
Source: The Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_04013/?r=-0.287,-0.082,1.477,0.715,0

This month, as part of my celebration of Black History Month, I’ve been delving into the clothing worn by Mary McLeod Bethune and her students, in the photo at the top of today’s blog post. You can learn more about Mary McLeod Bethune by clicking on the links I’ve provided whenever her name appears in this post.

Today’s blog post will discuss how I made the lovely white blouse for my African American Skipper, which you can see in the schoolhouse image below.

Before I go on, I need to make my required disclaimer statement: As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. To learn more about how affiliate marketing works on my website, please go to the Privacy Policy page. Thank you!

An African American Skipper doll appears to the right of a rust red painted old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse. The doll holds a large book which has an Art Nouveaux style cloth cover. The doll wears a white frock or blouse with a wide collar and frilly sleeves tucked into a long black tulip-shaped black skirt that barely exposes her black clad feet underneath. This doll is supposed to represent how the teenage students of Mary McLeod Bethune would have dressed for school in Florida, in 1905. The leaves on the trees behind the red schoolhouse display beautiful fall colors. The Chelly Wood dot com logo appears in one corner of the image.
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.

Last week we looked at how I made the skirt shown in that photo, and this week, we’re going to look at how I made the ruffle-sleeved blouse.

The process was really quite simple. I started with the View 4 shirt pattern from Simplicity 5861 for vintage Skipper patterns.

Now as you probably know, modern 10 inch Skipper dolls are larger than vintage 9 inch Skipper dolls, as you can see in the image below. For those who are new to sewing for dolls, image A shows a vintage Skipper; image B shows a modern Stacie (whose measurements are comparable to vintage Skipper); image C shows a Skipper doll from the 1990’s; and image D is today’s modern Skipper.

Four dolls, all of which are considered "Skipper-sized," stand in a lineup. Doll A (far left) is a vintage Skipper. She has long brown hair with bangs. She wears a Christmas-themed outfit: a red and white vertically pinstriped shirt with a collar and a bright green pleated skirt. The doll labeled "B" is a modern Stacie doll with long strawberry-blond hair. She wears a black and white gingham dress with a circle skirt. Doll "C" is an ordinary Skipper doll from the 1980's, and she has platinum blond, overly-long hair with just a small tuft of bangs. She wears a purple sundress with a floral skirt and felt bodice. The doll on the far right is Doll "D," a modern Skipper. She has long, dark brown hair with a small purple streak running through her hair. She models a pair of jeans and a raglan-sleeved T-shirt, a timeless fashion.
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.

So when I chose the view 4 shirt pattern from Simplicity 5861, it was my plan to have my African American Stacie doll model the altered blouse with the green pleated skirt you see my vintage Skipper wearing in the photo above. (By the way, my vintage Skipper is wearing the pleated skirt from Simplicity 5861‘s view 3 and the shirt from view 1.)

My idea was that Stacie’s skirt — even though it’s green — would look exactly like the pleated skirt worn by the eighth girl in line, in the photo of African American teacher, humanitarian, and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. Clearly the younger girls’ skirts are a lighter color than the older girls’ skirts in this photo, so why not imagine one green?

https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_04013/?r=-0.287,-0.082,1.477,0.715,0
Source: The Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_04013/?r=-0.287,-0.082,1.477,0.715,0

But when I finished sewing the blouse, I tried it on my African American Stacie doll and discovered that the sleeves were too long, due to the length of the eyelet lace I’d used to alter them.

A Mattel African American Stacie doll with her natural Afro hair in a pony tail on top of her head models a handmade long-sleeved white blouse over a green pleated handmade skirt. Her boots are made of soft brown velvet in a style that was common in the early 20th century. Her doll clothes were made using alterations to Simplicity 5861 for vintage Skipper dolls. This image comes from a blog post about Mary McLeod Bethune, for Black History Month 2026.
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 really wanted to be able to use that shirt! I was very disappointed. 😔

I even took these photos and doctored them, so Stacie was standing in an old classroom from around 1910 or so, with other students, and I made it black and white. I fiddled around with putting an AI hat on her, so she’d look even more like Mary McLeod Bethune’s students.

But in the end, I was unhappy with the whole thing. It didn’t look right. And I knew that the sleeves were just too long. But how did I make the blouse? Well it was simple enough…

Segmented image: how I made the student blouse. First image shows African American Skipper wearing a long-sleeved blouse with a high collar and ruffled sleeve cuffs over a black skirt. Second image shows Simplicity 5861 for vintage Skipper dolls with a close up of the view 4 shirt. The third image shows a woman's finger pointing to the bodice back near the hemline. The fourth image shows the shirt laid out on a cutting mat after sewing everything but the side seams, collar, and ruffle cuffs; eyelet lace trim has been sewn to the end of each sleeve. In the fifth image, elastic has been machine stitched to the bottom of one of the eyelet lace trim pieces, attached to one of the shirt's sleeves; this creates a ruffled appearance at the bottom of the eyelet lace. The sixth image shows the shirt pinned from sleeve cuff to underarm and from underarm to the bottom of the back of the shirt on one side, while the other side lays flat. In the final image, bias tape is being sewn to the collar of the shirt with hand stitches. This demonstrates how doll clothing designer Chelly Wood created the student blouse worn by Skipper in the first image, and it reminds us of the blouses worn by the school girls in the photo of Mary McLeod Bethune, in a photo of her with a long line of school children. This project is part of the Black History Month celebration at Chelly Wood dot com, in February of 2026.
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 infographic above shows the basic alterations that I made to the Simplicity 5861 view 4 blouse. But next week I’ll delve into it a little deeper.

Question: How do you feel about me using AI to add a hat to a photo like the one I took of Stacie? 

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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*Please note: when you click on links to various merchants on the ChellyWood.com 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.

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