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.