Recently, when I cleared up my dolls and their clothes, I paid attention that my Anne’s dress colors are faded out. And I realized that she was issued in 1996, and this means that her dress is 24 years old!
She deserves a new dress, definitely!
The prototype
I found a nice dress on Pinterest, followed its link and discovered that these are Matilda dress and Rosemary pinafore from Violette Field Threads.
So I decided to use this dress with pinafore as a prototype. I only thought that my pinafore should be really simple, without a collar, but in this case my dress should have the collar. I decided to keep other things like wide sleeves with gathers and laces, the dress hem trimmed with lace and ribbons on the pinafore.
I was about to buy a basic dress pattern for 16″ Helen Kish doll. I didn’t want to make it myself and would like to save my time avoiding doing mock-ups and so on. But I didn’t find any!
This fact surprised me, because I didn’t guess that these dolls are not so popular!
So I had to follow the long way: make a slope, sew a mock up, adjust and only then sew the dress and the pinafore.
The final result
As I wrote above, the dress has a white Peter Pan collar, wide sleeves gathered at elbow and trimmed with lace. The skirt is very simple, just gathered at waist and trimmed with lace. The pinafore embellished with vertical pintucks at the front and wide horizontal ones at the bottom, and ties with ribbons. Both, the dress and the pinafore, have button closure at the back.
Anne looks smiling, she got the new outfit first time in 24 years, and it suits her well 🙂
Would you like to see the young lady’s secret? Anne is embarrassing a little, but anyway will show you that she got new pantaloons as well! Also with pintucks and trimmed with lace 😉
