Shirt collars can be especially tricky when you’re making dolls’ clothes. Are there any tips for making a collar lay nicely on a doll’s shirt? Yes, there are, and that’s the topic of today’s blog post.
I know I’ve written about this topic before, but it gets brought up pretty regularly. Please forgive me if this is a repeat for you.
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The collar you see on my Bubble Cut Barbie above was an alteration I made to Advance 9939. I did a whole blog post on how I made this collar, and you can revisit that post here.
In brief, what you’re looking at isn’t the collar the designer suggested for that shirt. Instead, I added bias tape to form the collar you see above.
More recently, when working with McCall’s 4716, I actually made my own bias tape to form the collar of a little red gingham check shirt. If you’d like to learn how to make your own bias tape, I’ve done a blog post on that already as well. You can find that information here.
It’s almost impossible to tell, but the bias tape collar was actually cut from a different swatch of red gingham fabric than the shirt pieces. I still think it turned out perfectly fine.
I think you can really tell in Figures 2 and 3 above, how I sewed this bias tape directly to the shirt’s neckline.
What’s a little harder to see is the fact that I folded the cut edge of the bias tape inside the collar before I whipstitched it to the neckline in Figure 3.
To me, this is one of the easiest ways to make a collar stand up without flapping out oddly, but there are other things you can do as well.
Simplicity 9097 for Barbie dolls is one of many patterns that uses a turtleneck style stand collar, to solve the collar problem.
This is a situation in which the sewist decides to quit fighting the sticky-uppie collar problem, and just surrender to the natural way collars tend to work on dolls. That trick is also used in the very tiny McCall’s 2970 patterns for 6 inch dolls.
If you look closely at the View B dress on the cover of McCall’s 2970 (below), you’ll also see that they’ve used lace to finish off the collar on this dress. I’ve seen that trick in other patterns as well, but if you don’t use a yoke or lining on that type of collar, it falls apart easily in no time.
A further option is to cut out a peter pan style collar from craft felt and directly attach it to the neck opening.
This looks nice at first, but we all know what happens to felt after children play with it a lot.
When I designed my Santa coat for a friend’s child’s Pete the Cat doll, I used the felt collar method. As you can see in the image below, the collar lays mostly flat, and as I said, it initially looks very nice on this coat.
For better longevity, I also lined this coat. You can see how this coat is made right here, if you’re interested in trying this method.
Now I’m wondering what we can learn from you…
Questions: What methods do you prefer to use, to make your dolls’ shirts’ and coats’ collars lay flat and look natural? Can you add to the tips and tricks I’ve listed here? Have you tried any of these methods, and if so, how did it go? Please leave your response in the comments section below.
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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.