A Swap to Keep the Cold Away

 I recently participated in a winter holiday swap, and this is what I sent one of my partners.

It was originally going to be a dress for Anthea, but I didn't like how it turned out, so it sat in purgatory for a long time. The swap gave me the idea to give the dress a new home to an owner who'd use it.

My first order of business was to remove the skirt and add a waistband, as I didn't like how high it was originally. As I couldn't find more scraps of the fabric, I took some white cloth and embroidered a design to coordinate with the print. Here's a detail:

Bobby Suit

Not much to say here I'm afraid. It's a 40's style bobby suit adapted from a Bleuette pattern and made from a striped fat quarter. I think I like the concept of the suit more than the result. It's not bad, but not as exciting to look at as other things I've done.

 Silly picture with a better angle.

Cultural Fusion

This is a variant on my idea of shalwar kameez lolita. As far as I can tell, no kameez is ever made as a wrap front, but the top was already there from an abandoned project, and I made use of it. The sleeves are built in, and there are ribbons that ties in the back. I used two layers of lace at the neckline to add a sense of richness.

The shalwar are basic sloper pants with pintucks and lace to add to the fluffy theme, and the dupatta is made from several lengths of insertion and edging lace whip stitched together.

 Here is a detail of the shalwar. I like the look of the lace peeking out from the pintucks.

 And a view of the bow in the back, a better look at the dupatta:

A Long Awaiting Project

Way back when, I cut out a 1920s French idea of a kimono with some vague ideas as to how it will turn out. It eventually gained a complimenting pair of trousers, and a bit of trim to turn it into a slightly somber shalwar-kameez lolita outfit. The most time consuming part was cutting and stitching the lace together to make the dupatta scarf.

Here is what it looks like form the back, including a better view of the dupatta.

A detail of the lace under the tucks.

Crochet Trio

One day I spotted a free pattern on Den of Angels for a sleeveless crocheted dress. Due to a need to diminish my yarn stash, I picked up my small hook, some pretty red yarn and got to work...

The first issue was of the gauge. The pattern called for 70 odd stitches for the first row, which would have been to small for my MSD sized girls, so I increased it to 90 odd. When I noticed how lopsided her arm holes and back pieces were in relation to the waist, it took me a while to realize that I forgot to adjust the stitch numbers to accommodate the extra length. By this time it was too late to pull it out and start over (the yarn had been cut and knotted in places, plus wool is sticky and doesn't like to be pulled,) so and asymmetrical closure it was.

The next hiccup was not having enough yarn for the skirt. I tried to add a huge ruffle of contrasting yarn to make up for it, but that got boring after a while, so I declared that this would be worn with modesty trousers.

For dress number 2, I was armed with two hand dyed balls of yarn in similar shades of yellow. Neither one was terribly big, so a third skein in contrasting material was used for decorative bands to lengthen the skirt while making the yellow last. When I ran out of the first yarn, I put in a band of the contrast before starting with the second yellow to help disguise the difference in shade.

The third dress used crochet cotton, which led to a minor downfall. I had plenty of yarn to work with this time and the construction went smoothly except for some small details. On this dress the waist was higher and the shoulder further apart, but I decided to use this as a design feature. More annoying was that I was two thirds done with the skirt before I noticed that it was a bit too narrow, so I pulled it out and started over. During the second creation of the skirt I began getting a repetitive strain injury and I had to put it down for at least a month. Once I picked it up again I chose to finish the skirt at knee length rather than make my arm hate me by making it longer.

To emphasize the shoulder width, I added yellow along the armholes.

A Serbian Outfit

This outfit was an exercise is using old cloth. The materials used were antique silk, and I didn't have much of it.

The challenges of the dress portion was how to make a skirt long enough to go past the knees. This was a bit tricky as the pattern I chose, Bleuette's Serbian ensemble, has a rather high waist. The cloth also had a fair amount of holes, so in cutting around the damaged portions, I might have had enough for a shirt. Instead, I opted to embroider flowers over the holes.

Old Timey Wear

I blame this on St. Trinian's After reading and rereading my edition of the comics, I had it in me to replicate the uniform. I still haven't gotten around to it. I did see one 1907 pattern for a "school apron" that looked a bit like those English school uniform of yore. I looked at it, deduced the components as a pleated A-line dress with embroidered belt and unusual collar, and got started.

As a side note, the collar was not as intimidating as some others who made the dress believed it to be. It's a square with a rectangle cut out in the center front and back.

The dress was made from a fat quarter. After the main body was marked, there wasn't enough left to make the sleeve stripes run down the arm, but plenty of space if they went crosswise. It makes my geeky heart glad as it emulates what Rococo dresses liked to do with stripes.

The collar and belt are made from scraps  of a torn set of pants. I embroidered them with a Pekingese stitch which has the delight of being dead easy but rather complicated looking.

A Personal Favorite

On account of Frederica's love of looking serious and grown-up, I set out to make her a variety of suits and old fashioned wear. My first trip was unsurprisingly to a Bleuette pattern site where I combed the pages, looking for designs that had what I was looking for. This was one of my first creations.

The jacket was what really caught my eye. With side front and side back seams, it looked like an ideal candidate for piping. Even better was that I had the perfect fabric on hand in the form of a fat quarter with brightly colored Asian toys on a black background. my stash of plain black fabric would serve as the main body of the jacket and the fat quarter would serve as jacket accents and the dress. All I needed to buy was piping.

By contrast, the dress underneath was unremarkable. Instead of copying and redrafting the pattern to fit a larger size like I did for the jacket, I pulled out a pattern I already had. It's essentially a sleeveless, A-line hip length bodice with a pleated skirt.

Incidentally, this was my first time working with piping. I used my zipper foot like my machine manual said, but it did not sit as closely to the seam as I'd like. Fortunately few people are as picky as me or likely to look at it that close up.

Serious Face

Like many people, I like Volks' F-06 mold. I've also had my eye on various tanned dolls over the years, so at the last NYC Dolpa, when I heard that Sunlight would be available, I knew what I must do.

Much of her look was pulled from a character I created I wanted to put into a doll but never did. Hence the brown skin, longer legs, and slightly more mature body (you can hardly tell when they're dressed, but that's an aside.) The serious expression and red brown coloring also came from that other concept.

An important distinction though was that I wanted to make her Lilja's older sister, so I ordered a wig and eyes in colors similar to little sister. She is named after two characters from the game Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Her full name is Frederica, after the character Frederica Bernkastel, and her nickname is Rica, after Furude Rika. This doll's big desire is to be though of as an adult, which frequently reflects in her clothes and manner.