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:

Attack of the Face Huggers

Below, you will see the reason for my long absence. It is not because I am easily distracted, or that it's hard to get back into the habit of blogging. You see, I've been stalked by flat brown slug-creatures that enjoy adhering to my mouth, nose and eyes. It wasn't until recently that I was able to trap them, and imprison them on my ironing board:

A sweater I'd been working on felt bad for their plight, and decided to join them in a show of solidarity.

In a Day

This skirt is a little something I whipped up with some self striping yarn the summer before I started graduate school. As the title suggests, it was much quicker than I anticipated. I whipped it up using the Hey Mickey pattern found on Knitty.

A hodgepodge

This is a picture I took back in graduate school. All of the girls here are wearing homemade clothes, with the exception of Mariko's green dress.

Yu Lian, who you can't see so well, is in a white dress with grey embroidery and pintucks down the front. Yu Wei is wearing a pinafore with a great many tucks down the front  and around the skirt.

All the tinies are wearing sweaters based off of the same pattern on Den of Angels. What Mariko was wearing was meant for Calla and Nurit, but the yarn was so thin it ended up too small and went to her. Nurit has a cap sleeved sweater due to me running out of yarn, but that makes it nice and spring like. Calla has her top decorate with rows of hot pink running stitches.

Calla and Nurit are also wearing skirts knitted from the same Bleuette pattern, but with different yarns.

From the Early Days

This is one of the first things I made for Anthea, cut from a torn velveteen pair of my pants and trimmed with homemade trim made from yarn.

The skirt is dead simple, made from two trapezoids, a triangle, and a hook and eye. There's no waistband, I just turned down both ends and hemmed. It largely exists to preserve her modesty when she wears the top half of the outfit. The overgown is the star of the show.

What makes the outfit is the contrast of the white on black. The trim inspired by a gown from Patterns of Fashion 3, particularly the curved back and the borders. For make it, I simply made crochet chains until I got the lengths I wanted. The frog balls are also crocheted, and the loops are bits of plain yarn with knots at the end.

Here, she also sports a cap and shawl. As a girl who hates the cold, layers are adored. The cap is called a sortie, and comes from the Godey's Ladies Book, by way of Koshka the Cat. To make it her scale, I did trial and error until it looked right. The shawl is a rectangle of knitted cotton in a basket weave stitch, with fringes at the ends.

Fully Knitted

Here is a pair of separates that I made at different times. The top is of an improvised pattern I made, using a mock cable stitch from Knitting on the Edge. The sweater was going to be part of a Silent Hill cosplay if Cheryl, but I still haven't gotten around to making the jumper.

The skirt is a mock pleated affair with the pattern taken from The Bleu Door. I rather like the yarn I used, and it has appeared in several projects.

Knitted Dresses

Way back when Mariko was still new to my group, I was hunting for clothing patterns for her. I heard that Blythe clothes fit her mold, so off I went to look. I already knew that Knitty had patterns for Blythe. Through them, I found WoolyRockers free patterns, and from there, a simple tube dress pattern on another site. I made two dresses with that pattern, though when I went hunting to find it for the second project, I couldn't find the place. Instead, I took a look at outfit #1 and figured it out from there.

Here is the first dress. It was done on double point needles in mostly stockinette, with some ribbing at the waist. Up top are a pair of flaps to cover the upper body, also done in rib, and eyelet holes in the back that serve as buttonholes. The buttons were are the result of knotting, and though they work, they don't look the greatest. Also, when I first made this dress, it was a glorified shirt, and I had to add some rows at the bottom to cover Mariko's underpants.

The second one has pretty beads for buttons, longer flaps, and a longer skirt. When I photographed Mariko for this post, I put her in some purchased Licca pants for the fun of it, and it rather highlights how short these things are. Oh well, she's a little girl so the occasional innocent short skirt is all right.

Spring Green in Winter

Some years ago, I had to spend the night in the hospital for tests. I brought with me some yarn, knitting needles, and the book Knitting on the Edge. I took two patterns and made this for Linnea:

I also made a couple of other tube tops for her, but they're in different colors and don't coordinate like these two do.

Lace and Knit

This is a blend of stuff I made ages ago. The tube top is made from a rib pattern from Knitting on the Edge, the skirt is Hey Mickey! from Knitty, and the sleeves are supposed to be a Regency spencer but didn't look right over the gowns.

A Study in White

I rather like this photograph and color combination. The petticoat is part of Kozu's original outfit, the tube top was made by me in college, I don't remember when.

Casual Trio

Here is a sample of some less elaborate things I make for my girls. Some of these pieces I even finished in a timely fashion!

The skirt Mariko is wearing was my first attempt at making the spiral ribbed skirt for Calla and Nurit. I made some error in the instructions, as the waist ended up much too small for the bigger girls. Up top she is wearing the Sleeves a Go Go (second pattern from the top) pattern made for Blythe that looks good on her.

Nurit has a blouse made from a 1930s Bleuette pattern. The ruffle really makes the shirt, doesn't it? The skirt is from a scrap of cloth I had since grade school. There wasn't much of it left, but with careful cutting it made a respectable skirt.

Calla's dress was one of the first three dresses I made for Yu Wei, before she arrived. I was going through some of Yu Wei and Yu Lian's older things and decided that I wasn't thrilled with the construction of the dress. Calla was fairly new to my group at the time, so I concluded that it would be best to cut down the bodice and turn it it into a summery tiny dress.

The shirt she has on over the dress was made during a time I worried that she and Nurit has more skirts than tops. Few bjds wear shortgowns which are really simple to made and was something I could take with me where ever. I got horribly distracted (again,) so it took me a while to finish the pleats, but this top has served us well.

Dear Little Sisters

I adore the video game Bioshock. While I am far from the best of gamers and still play on old generation consoles, I do keep track a little bit as to what's being made, and hear about the current generation games from my significant other. From what I heard and saw, Bioshock was all kinds of amazing. I decided I should get some tinies to make into Little Sisters.

Shortly after, Volks USA was having one of its many After Party events, which included some YoSDs which caught my eye. This new pair were known as Kanon and Neon, and I found their molds to be adorable. I had some money saved up, so I put in a lottery application to get the girl type, Kanon. I was so thrilled when I found out I won her, and immediately started to sew.

Choosing a name for her was not as simple as designing and making her dresses. After weeks of indecision, I was eating out and noticed a burgundy calla lily in a vase, and decided that my girl would be known as Calla.

Calla made a very good Little Sister, but in the game there are supposed to be many of them. After a while I started casually looking at sales on DoA to see if there were any tinies I liked that I could afford. In particular I liked the Bambicrony Kumi and the Custom House Uri. Very eventually I found a Kumi I could afford and I bought her.

This doll was the first faceup I did, and it included some bad mishaps, including staining (which can't be seen with a wig on,) and broken resin along her lips (which can only be seen very close up.) I highly recommend that for your first faceup, you go for a stylized look. The faces for Little Sisters aren't terribly detailed or subtle, so the end result turned out very close to what I wanted.

After some thinking and research, I chose the name Nurit for this girl. It's Hebrew for "buttercup," and the Latin name for that flower indicates that it grows in rather watery circumstances.

Here are the pair, with Calla in a knit dress that comes from a Bleuette pattern, and Nurit in a clumsily home dyed dress. Since the clothes of the Little Sisters are not the tidiest, it doesn't bother me at all. The needle guns are also made by me.

Happy Occasions

Here is something I made for a swap late last year. The theme for this was "Dress for the Occasion," in which the participants listed two events for their doll that they wanted an outfit for. My partner requested an outfit for an autumn day at school or a family portrait. Her doll was a boy that liked casual clothing, pockets, and the colors green and blue.

I think this outfit can reasonably do both. I knit the sweater from two tiny balls of yarn left over from other, human-sized projects. The shirt has a collar and a pocket over the left breast, while the trousers have two back pockets and one in front. The sweater pattern was taken from the DoA forum, though I took some liberties with it. The pants were heavily altered from the Undead Threads slopers, and the shirt pattern came from Dolly Dolly vol. 24 and changed so much as to be unrecognizable. The only thing I bought for this outfit were the buttons, everything else was from my still too large stash.

And then...

There came Yu Lian. As the story of Rose and Lotus was about a pair of sisters, I started saving up to buy Yu Wei's other half.

Don't they look wonderful together? This was taken shortly after Yu Lian left her box. Yu Lian is modeling a sweater that I adapted for a pattern meant for American Girl dolls, and a sundress beneath that was a part of Yu Wei's initial wardrobe. Yu Wei meanwhile is showing off a Rococo inspired dress I made from a fat quarter. I'm rather pleased with how that dress turned out, it was one of my first self drafted creations, made from a body block I took off of Yu Wei.

Yu Lian is an old body Dream of Doll Tender Zen girl. Her name was chosen to match that of her sister and means "Jade Lotus."