Dressing Miniature Barbie Part 1

Saturday, I began the miniature doll part of my project. I decided to start with the miniature Barbies, because the dolls themselves can't be altered much, and they all had a dress that could be dismantled for patterns. These Barbies have the big toothy smile, and you can't really change the face character when it is this mold. I decided to just leave the faces the way they are but change the hair. They all got a haircut, and the hair is getting tamed down some with the plastic wrap. I did have a tutorial on how to change the style of Barbie hair completely with boiling water or something... maybe I'll do that later, for now, I'm just going to make them all some new clothes.




These are the princess dresses the dolls came with. I don't see them as princesses or fairies, but since they are all tall compared to the other female dollhouse scale dolls, they may be Amazon women. Maybe they are just model types from the 60s-70s with that clean "girl next door" look they had back then?




Sunday... I got out some full size fashion doll patterns to see the size comparison, and tried to adjust for size. I wasted a lot of time on this, because I thought I had a program that would just reduce pictures by 50% on my computer. That must have been with my first printer though, because I couldn't figure it out and pretty much just wasted the whole day for nothing.




Sunday night, Monday, and Monday night... I tried free-hand reducing the patterns to a scale dollhouse size. For a while, I thought I'd figured it out and made several sample pieces of clothing from some soft Batise fabric. (I didn't want to risk any of my beautiful vintage hankies until I knew the pattern would work out.) The pieces were still too big in some ways, and though I could have altered the clothing pieces themselves with seams and darts, I decided to take a new approach instead.





I carefully took apart every piece of dollhouse doll clothing I had, (there weren't many things, so it wasn't like I was giving up something precious), and made new pattern pieces of this clothing.



I finally decided to make something from a hankie late last night. The top part of the dress is almost finished, then I will add a gathered skirt to it. No pictures yet, I wanted to make sure it turns out first. Actually, I'm almost finished with the second bodice of the dress. The first one, I couldn't quite get the tiny sleeves in and my fabric frayed to almost oblivion at the shoulder. After that, I put very, very thin strips of scotch tape on the edge of the cut fabric pieces before I started sewing. This has been successful, and the second bodice went fairly quickly.