The bug had bitten me hard! Now I wanted to make a bunch of dresses with a standardized pattern. I took Kristin's apron dress and I modified it to stand alone. The apron dress has wide shoulders to accommodate the apron overlaying it. This created a strange, flattened pattern piece for the sleeves. Using my patternmaking skills, I drafted a more standard sleeve piece and removed the excess shoulder fabric in the bodice pieces. I also simplified the sleeve and the 3 skirt pieces into one piece. Then I experimented with this pattern. Here's the first dress I made with it.
I embellished it with some cute floral lace on the sleeve edges and near the hem.
I serged and turned the neckline in the blue dress above and ended up topstitching it also. Very fiddly.
In this red dress, I trimmed the waist with rickrack and a grosgrain ribbon. The sleeves and neckline are trimmed with rickrack and turned to hem.
Finishing the neckline was always a gamble. Either I used rickrack along the edge to turn it or just clipped and serged the edge and topstitched it. This sometimes created holes in the neckline, which I felt would be a weakness especially in doll clothing. I really disliked these ways to finish the neckline, so I looked into using a bias binding there instead. This was fabulous! Here's the result in this dress:
Not many frills here, but a good solid dress pattern.
For ease in dressing the dolls, I finished the back of all of these with 3/4" velcro-- the hooks on the underlap right side and the fuzzy side on the overlap left side. This is when looking at the dress. You always want the hook side facing away from the body, at least in humans.
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