New Dolls, New Place

Come follow me and the new collection of dolls and doll clothing on SquareSpace:

Phoebeandegg.com

Anatomy of a dress

Not all doll dresses are this simple and sweet. They should be. This pattern has the perfect combination of hand sewing and machine sewing and it comes together cleanly. The embroidery floss for the smocking combined with the fabric is what sets the dresses vibe.

I'll post the finished dress on a new doll soon.

I love the detritus of sewing.

Smocking

I love smocking. It is detail, handwork and most of all combining color.

Soon to be a dress on the doll.

Hand Me Downs

She is wearing a dress made for an earlier doll while she is waiting for a hand smocked dress.

Impatiently waiting for some clothes

Just a few bad shots with my iPhone in artificial light, but I wanted to share the new look. Would love feedback, but can understand if you rather wait until she has some clothes.

Stuffed

I have a prototype--finished, stuffed and button joints secured. That's the good news.

The bad news...

I am not happy with the the knees and elbows. They add realism in posing and movement, but maybe too much realism for the doll I have in mind. Designing a doll requires a careful balance between realism and simplification (ie making the doll cute). That balance is different for each doll and its intended home.

I am designing a play doll and the joints cross the line.

But this is not a difficult change to make and it will make making the doll easier.  Not so many fiddly parts to finesse.

It is also harder for a child to dress with so many moving parts. And those elbows are scary.

Ten things I've learned about doll pattern-making

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am designing a more three dimensional jointed doll. In the process I have learned a thing or two:

1. Trying to learn Adobe Illustrator to trace my patterns and give them clean magical lines without a teacher was a big waste of my time. 
2. Don't convince yourself that pinning a bunch of Adobe Illustrator tutorials on Pinterest is a good use of time. It is just procrastinating and pinning.
3. However, Pinterest is extremely useful for studying other people's dolls and how they are constructed. That is not procrastinating, that is studying.
4. Tracing paper, quilting rulers, a flexible curve, a pencil, a medium tipped black marker, a circle template and a copying machine are the best tools.
5. Know when to use tracing paper and when to use a copy from the printer. Tracing paper is good for flipping and creating symmetry or making a major change to an existing shape. Drawing on a xerox is good for tweaks, because the existing shape stays accurately the same.
6. If you get a piece of fabric that after a bunch of tweaking might be just the right shape, copy the piece of fabric with the copier and then trace for your pattern piece.
7. Clean up often, otherwise you can't tell what is the current arm or a rejected arm.
8. Doll pattern making requires more patience and accuracy than doll clothes pattern making, but when you are done you have something that will be fun and useful to make dolls for quite a while. I am hoping that happens by the end of today or this weekend.
9. A pattern for one dress does not give the same sense of satisfaction. 
10. Try not to think about the cost of the materials you are using. If you enjoy work in the material you will be using, you get a better sense of the issues, ie fraying, or stretching, or bulk, or final look and appeal.

I should have something more fun than the wastebasket later today or tomorrow.

The Doll Book

I started sewing people clothes when I was eight. I made a simple dress for my six year old sister. She did wear the dress but I don't recall how much coercion was involved. Later I moved on to doll clothes and then I received this book--The Doll Book.

I was obsessed. I made many of the dolls and clothes from this book.  The dolls are Barbie sized. When I was little I did not like the way Barbies were mixed in the photos with the cloth stuffed dolls, but now I am charmed by it.

The book includes patterns for a family of dolls. She gave you faces, directions for dozens hair styles and even a baby.

The clothing section spans 200 years of fashion for the entire family. The book had information about each period of clothing, patterns (pages upon pages of patterns) and directions on making clothing details.

I made many of the dolls and clothing, and tried to set up historic scenes like the author. I then photographed them. They were blurry and often on my front steps because of the better lighting and stairs were useful to prop the dolls up.

This book has followed me into adulthood and every time I pull it off the shelf I am reinspired and completely charmed.

The book is available used on Amazon.

Sneak Peek

Modeling clothing.

Back Torso with arms basted on.

Front/side torso.

Although the button joints were simple to make (there is a good lesson online here While She Naps-button joints). I am not sure if they are realistic enough to mimic human limb and joint movement for me.  The doll that comes closest to this is a Saha doll, shown below. Her limbs and head are strung with elastic cord that connects through a rings in her torso. I have ordered some cotter pin joints and will attempt to do this when they arrive. I also want to try  bead joints for the elbows and knees.

As far as the shape of my prototype. It is a bit early to say, but I am generally happy except the length of the neck needs to be shortened. She is also not consistently symmetrical. I need to take my sharpie drawn on tracing pattern pieces and even them out in Adobe illustrator. Some thing to keep the momentum while I wait for the cotter joints and bead joints.

more protoyping and even more patience

Thanks to a little help from Susanna Oroyan, I am four torsos, five heads and three arms into a new doll. Lots of expensive wool felt and tracing paper in my trash cans. But I am close and am feeling on the brink of something good.

She is more three dimensional from head to toe with jointed arms, elbows and hips. The knees are yet to be designed. I am waiting for upholstery thread and 2cm wood beads to arrive to try an internal bead joint for the knee.

Photos tomorrow hopefully.

Almost a Winter Day

Just needs the boucle scarf, which is still on the needles,

 despite being only 7 stitches wide.

Patience and Prototypes

UGH! No pun intended.

This pair of doll boots, made from wool, fleece and coconut buttons, is my fourth attempt and they are still not right. When I flipped them right side out for a final time, I realized the buttons were on the front flap and the elastic loop button holes were on the back boot flap. Exactly opposite from what a real boot has. They also are a tad small.

The first feeling that hits is... really? I cannot use these, but need to make yet another pair. Slightly bigger and reversing the loop button situation.

This is often the case when producing the first of something a sweater pattern, a shoe, a dress or a doll. Some things still need to be corrected.

I have to remind myself I am working on a prototype. And prototypes take patience. I create a prototype not just to work out the big things, but also all the details. To have the patience to work these all out ahead of time, actually saves time. You kind of front load your errors in the prototype stage. The trick is to have the patience to stay in the prototype stage until you have ironed out all of the serious kinks.

Once in rare while, your very first attempt is exactly what you imagined. Yes, enjoy the euphoria when this happens, but also take note the euphoria is because this is the exception.

Four tries at dolls boots made me think.... I might have rushed through the prototype stage with my dolls too. This morning I started working on a more three dimensional head for the dolls. I am also rethinking how the arms work.

So nothing on Etsy for a while. Just patience on my part. Stay tuned for a bit of rethinking.

Opinions are always welcome!

Winter and White

The blog got cast aside again, due to the bronchitis that has gone viral around here. Hacking temporarily won out over sewing.

But winter and white have inspired me. Above a white dress to accompany a faux-isle cardigan and boots. Below a winter wool pea coat to accompany a corduroy jumper, leggings, t shirts and boots.

All almost ready to list on Etsy.