Butterick 3419, pt. 2

So, this morning I finished up the little green silk gown, sewing on a snap at the waist and burying the thread tails from that and the bit of velcro I stitched on last night.

It fits brilliantly... just not for the doll I'd hoped it would.

Looks quite good, and quite true to the pattern illustration, doesn't it?  But it was clearly designed for the Twist 'n Turn Barbie body, not the Bellybutton body.  It will not close on the Bellybutton body, and there is no ease room on the Twist 'n Turn body.  Which means this entire pattern, and indeed, probably all my "day clothes" Barbie patterns, are for that body shape.  The trousers fit the Bellybutton body... because they have an elastic waistband.  sigh

Well, there are a couple of non-fitted dresses in my patterns that will probably work for the Bellybutton body type.  And I guess I have an excuse to buy the current 11.5" doll patterns whenever Joann's Fabrics next puts McCalls patterns on sale.

Pattern notes for this dress: I did not use the interfacing in the skirt that the pattern wanted.  I didn't have any, and at this scale, the dress really doesn't need it.  I finished the neckline with 1/2" bias tape, as suggested, and after folding it over, I machine-sewed it down.  It looked horrible.  So I ripped those stitches out and redid them by hand.  The hem was also hand-sewn, as were the sleeve cuffs.  I pinked most interior seams after sewing them, and used Fray Check on the sleeve, waist, and center back bodice raw edges.

Butterick 3419

Pattern sewing project #1 done!  I took that scrap of green silk and managed to fuss with pattern layout just enough that I was able to get both a dress and a pair of trousers from it.  And possibly a gathered skirt as well, but I've yet to figure that out.

So!  I decided, for my first foray in a long time in sewing from doll clothing patterns, to go with this one:

Butterick 3419 is dated to 2002, so it's twenty years old.  But obviously styled older than that, with fashions of the 1960s.  But, most pertinently, it should have been designed with the "bellybutton" Barbie that came out in 1999 in mind.

My first project was the trousers, since they only had two pieces.  See upper middle-left illustration.

Here's how they turned out, on both the Classic bellybutton Barbie (left), and the Petite bellybutton Barbie (right), which came out in 2016:

The trousers are a good length on Petite, but about 3/4" too short on Classic!  So I've written myself a note to that effect on the pattern piece.  And for one more comparison:

The trousers are also a good length on 1990s Skipper, but perhaps a bit too full.

Next, the "bridesmaid" dress from this pattern (front right image)!

Sewing for Dolls

Might have gotten a couple more Barbies at the thrift store the other day.  One is another Curvy with red hair that I've named Aloy (as in, the main character from Horizon Zero Dawn), and Wonderful Husband agrees with me that I really need to make her that costume.  I also got a blonde ModelMuse doll that I named Morticia (despite the platinum blonde hair) because her lipstick and nails are very red and her expression leaves me no doubt that she has murdered someone.  And a Petite with medium-brown skin and an Afro-ponytail hybrid, who I've named Nichelle in honor of the late Nichelle Nichols.

I also finally remembered that I have a bunch of Barbie clothes patterns, and pulled them out of their box in the garage:

The stack on the left is pre-1999 (when the new body type was introduced, so these will only fit my narrow-waisted dolls from the '80s), the middle stack is costumes of one variety or another, and the right stack is everyday clothes.

And these are the fabrics I picked from the free/discard table at quilt guild.  The two greens on the right are silk - the darker one four yards of charmeuse.  I get first dibs on that!  But the lighter green is a remnant, and a good portion of the rest is probably also intended for Barbie clothes of one kind or another.  Though, for a couple of the lighter prints, I found myself rifling through the set of historical patterns and lamenting that somehow they didn't include a Regency dress pattern!  Well, when it comes to it, either I'll buy one online, or figure it out for myself.

For now, I'm going to make a 1960s day dress out of that green silk remnant and figure out a bit more about how to make clothes at Barbie's scale.

I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World...

So I went out into the garage and checked the box that said it had dolls in it.  And it did, indeed, have my two Barbie doll cases from the 1980s!  So I brought them into the house and looked to see what I had.  Current count, including the newbies, is seven Barbies (including the Black one and the Curvy one), one Ken, one Lea, one Courtney, and... two Skippers.

Skipper on the left is Great Shape Skipper, dating from 1984 or so.  Skipper on the right, my $.50 thrift store find, is Sun Sensation Skipper, from 1991.  Quite a difference.  I guess we know when Barbie's little sister hit puberty!

I have also discovered that combing freshly detangled Barbie hair is oddly hypnotic.  Last night I did a salon session for the Curvy and Black Barbies, so they have lovely smooth hair now.  I also watched a few tutorials this morning on how to curl Barbie hair, and they gave me ideas.  Just saying.

I have also (for now) finished my sewing for Curvy.  She has two (and a half) outfits.  Time to move on to the next victim doll.

This rose fabric was on the discard table at the quilt guild because it was ugly or something.  I think it makes a perfect Barbie dress.

 

The skirt went better with the blouse in my head than on paper. I really should make a different skirt to go with the blouse.  Which is okay, because!

The skirt will also work as a shorter dress.

Heat Wave

Ugh.  This is one of those weeks where we open the doors and windows late at night and early in the morning, and shut up the house during the rest of the day, hiding from the heat.  The fans are on, and the lightly-clad individuals are miserable.  Or maybe it's just me.

Ironically, if I was at Costume College right now... the temperatures are slightly lower in Woodland Hills, California than they are in Gig Harbor, Washington.  Ah well.  Que sera sera.

So.  Picnic Quilt #2 still sits on my sewing table, a bit over half quilted.  Eight more basket blocks to go!  But I've not been feeling it in this heat.  (Was it just earlier this month that I told Wonderful Husband that I was amazed that I was quilting during the summer, because in California it would have been Too Hot?  Clearly I jinxed myself.)

So what have I been up to?  Well, yesterday I took Squiddle and Jazzy to see Kung Fu Panda at the cinema.  During the summer, the local theater runs a different cartoon movie each week for $2/ticket.  And we've gone to the splash pad once.  Today's plans involve the library, the tiny thrift store next to it, and one item to pick up from the Food Market next to that.

Speaking of thrift stores!  Last week I found this at Goodwill:

It was $3.  And it may not look like much in the above, but take a closer look at some of the fabrics:

I think it's possible this quilt top is over a hundred years old.  Unfortunately, no one at my main guild is really into vintage/antique fabrics, so when I took it in for show-and-tell, I wasn't able to get a consensus.  Still, it's awesome and it has me jazzed!

Guild was actually kind of funny (to me) this week, because the activity was fabric sorting, in prep for the October Sewing Room Sale.  "Get rid of anything that's old or ugly" was the goal.

And I?  I am a scrap quilter.  I have no judgment of what's "ugly".  One of the other members held up a piece of fabric and lamented how horrible it was.  I looked at it and LOVED the color combination and William Morris-esque design!  I was as useful as a lead balloon.  (Well, not really.  I ran fabrics to various themed tables, and put together bundles, and helped unpack and repack the tubs.)  At the end of things, we were all told we could take what we wanted off the discards table.  And I picked out a few things, including several yards of green silk charmeuse!  In the end, there were three big totes worth of stuff to be donated.

One of the pieces I snagged was what turned out to be a fat quarter of this:

Which is on its way to becoming a Barbie dress. Because while going to thrift stores, I have picked up a quartet of $.50 Barbies.  Two are Skipper and Courtney from the 1990s, both in fabulous (if nude) condition.  The Courtney has an amazing lot of hair!  I thought they might be a good gift for Niecelet, but apparently she is not a doll girl. :(  So they're for me, I guess.  I also found one of the modern "curvy" Barbies that has a more realistic figure, and a Black Barbie, which I know I don't have any of.  (My dolls from the 1980s are in the trunk in the garage; I should dig them out.)  So after removing the blue marker swimsuit from Curvy (using a scrubby and dishsoap for most of it, and a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol for the last 10%), I'm making her a dress using this pattern.  Currently I'm overcasting the edges of the dress by hand; I'm thinking the next time I'm near a Joann's, I need to pick up a bottle of fray check, because that will be much faster....

On The Sewing Table This Morning

Yesterday evening it rained, breaking the humidity that had grown oppressive.  And we're only in the mid-70s for highs here!  I have trouble imagining how it must feel in parts of the world where it's hot and humid.

But since nothing was lacking but the will, as the saying goes, I finally sat down and started quilting the next picnic quilt:

I got this quilt top (and another probably by the same maker, which will also become a picnic quilt) sometime in the 2014-2019 time range in a thrift store in Anaheim, CA.  The sashing is from the 1960s (there are spots where you can read the selvage info, which includes a 1961-62 date), but the blocks are hand-sewn and, I feel, probably from the 1950s.  The sashing is... not terribly well measured, so the blocks puff up a bit.  The sashing also wobbles back and forth, which finally dissuaded me from quilting cables into it.  Instead, I did straight-line stitching down each side of the sashing and saved the free-motion stuff for the twenty quilt blocks.  It's mostly point-to-point arcs inside the triangles and the white square at the top of the basket, but I did decide to go with pebbling for the side rectangles, to try to eat up some of that excess fabric.  One and a half baskets done out of the twenty, but I'm not going to stitch more until after the boys wake up.

And all the time I was quilting last night, I thought to myself that I was never able to do quilting in the summer in Anaheim, because it was just too hot....

June Report

 So.  Radio silence for a month and a half.  What have I been up to during that time?

Well.  I bought another treadle sewing machine.  I saw it at the thrift store for $200, but furniture was 25% off that day.  She's a Singer 28 dating to 1905, so a three-quarters size machine.  Three-quarters size treadles are rare!  I'd never even seen one before!  The wood was all in very good condition (including the wooden pitman rod!), with just a tiny bit of veneer loss on the top of the coffin lid.  Everything moved freely.  So after hemming and hawing through the length of the store, I bought her and brought her home.  I placed her where my other treadle (a 1913 Singer 66 back-clamp) had been and moved that machine into the bay window.

As part of my bargain with myself, this meant actually relearning to sew on a treadle.  So I've gotten both machines into full working order and actually been sewing on the 66 treadle (it gets better light in the front window)!  I made twenty 8.5" crumb blocks for my guild's charity quilting, and have since made a wall hanging also.

I also finished up quilting feathers into the rather plain-Jane quilt top I'd gotten from the thrift store, and bound it.  I'd intended it for a picnic quilt, and it's already been used as such - we met a couple of our neighbors at the splash pad over the weekend and spread out in the shade under the trees while the kids played in the water.  I'm thinking I need to make another couple picnic quilts so we can all have something better to sit on than towels.  So while digging through stash this morning to find a backing for the aforementioned wall hanging, I pulled out another couple of thrift store quilt tops, and some backing to go with the first of them.  I'm thinking simpler straight-line quilting this time....

Of this year's three new garden beds, I've only gotten one leveled and in place.  Last week, my dad came over in his truck, helped me build a 6" topper for the bed, and we bought a cubic yard of soil at Wilco to go in it.  It took darned near all of the soil!  But I got it planted rapidfire with the rest of the tomatoes and peppers.  I did another A-frame with a pair of the bamboo trellises I've lashed over the past few years, and put the summer squash and some more squash seeds to go in between them on one side, and a whole packet of Minnesota Midget cantaloupe seeds down the other side.  I had to tie the trellis to the tomato cages and sink a couple of t-stakes on the other side and tie it to those as well, because the hot winds we've had over the past couple days kept blowing it over.  Down the center I did three lines of radishes and carrots, and I plunked in marigolds and violets wherever there was space.  We had three days near or over ninety degrees, so the first radishes are already poking their heads up!

Now to get bed #2 leveled....

The cold, wet spring means that certain crops really aren't bearing this year.  We'll see how things go.  I was hoping for cherries this year, but, alas, I have a grand total of two on the tree.  On the other hand, my strawberries and peas are bearing prolifically at the moment!  And it's very clearly time to harvest and dry the year's supply of oregano again.  Four plants, and it's all I need for both my parents and myself.