Today’s project is a vintage Barbie dress with panels across the bodice. I used two different vintage Barbie patterns to make this dress for a good reason: I was trying to use up my tiny bits of leftover purple fabric!
I also had some black fabric, which I had bought at a yard sale. This black fabric was some sort of polyester blend, and it had already been cut out to be used as a person’s dress when I bought it. Usually that doesn’t matter; there’s plenty of fabric in a person’s garment pieces to be re-used as doll clothes.
But as you’ll find out in today’s blog post, I lived to regret that decision…
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You may remember that I used the Advance 9938 Barbie pattern to make a lovely Christmas dress a couple of years ago, and it turned out wonderful.
The fabrics you see in the Figures 1-3 images above were also thrifted fabrics. There was only a wee bit of the red and white Christmas tree fabric, so it worked great to use these thin strips of fabric as part of the Advance 9938 View 3 dress bodice’s front panels.
As you can see in the images below, this bodice was part of a very long gown pattern. Here’s a link to the original article I wrote about that dress.
In a later article, I experimented with using an entirely matching fabric for the bodice panels, but attaching the bodice to a much shorter skirt.
I got the skirt pattern you see below from the Advance 2895 Barbie pattern‘s View 3 dress.
But for this week’s dress, I decided to use the same paneled bodice, so I could use up a couple of very teeny-tiny purple scraps; however this time I wanted to attach it to a pencil skirt instead of a full skirt, like the ones you scrolled through previously.
So I chose to attach the bodice to the pencil skirt that goes with the green dress you see in View 4 below, in the same Advance 2895 pattern that I’ve used before.
However this time, my focus was on creating a bodice with a lining, using the itty bitty purple scraps I had for two of the bodice panels (see figure 1 below) and the strips of fabric that I used for straps (see figure 2 below).
The black fabric you see in the image below made up all the rest of the fabric for this Barbie dress. Again, the black fabric was also earth-friendly because it was part of a yard sale fabric purchase from somebody’s unfinished human-sized garment project.
Now I don’t know if you can tell, but I’ve given this dress bodice a lining, something I didn’t do in either of the earlier iterations of the dresses using Advance 9938‘s paneled bodice.
If you look closely at figures 1, 3, and 4, you’ll see that I’ve actually doubled the panels and sewn a lining made of 5 black panels while the outer bodice uses the 2 purple panels in between 3 black panels.
Have a good look at the texture of the wrong side of the dress’s skirt in figure 4 above. Can you see that weave? This black fabric was actually quite thick.
The solid colored thick black fabric probably would’ve been just fine to use in an adult woman’s dress, but for a tiny Barbie doll, this fabric’s extra thickness created a problem.
Ugh! Do you see how bulky that back closure area is?
There’s good news though. The black fabric had a lot of stretch to it, almost like polyester woven together with swimsuit fabric. So I was able to make the closure work.
From the front, the dress looks fine. From the back though…? Yeah, not so much.
So the lesson I’ve learned is to avoid any kind of bulky material when making doll clothes. A thinner fabric is simply going to work better. I knew this going in, and I had just hoped I could make it work anyway. Bad idea!
A few examples of thick material to avoid include scuba fabric, thick corduroy, used denim from someone’s jeans, and sometimes fabrics with a pile like thick velvets and furs. Fabric that’s meant to be used for interior decorating is usually not a good choice either.
Questions: Can you add to this list of fabrics to avoid when making doll clothes? What fabrics have you had a difficult time with in the past, and why? Please add a comment below!
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