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.

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.

A Parade of Uniforms

I have a soft spot for uniforms. I had absolutely no desire to wear one as a student, but for cosplay or as something to put my girls in, I love playing with designs. Most of these are my own creations, but a couple are cosplay outfits.

Here are Dalya and Lilja. The former is sporting a jumper I'm really pleased with. The fabric is nice and I love how full the skirt is. A shirt with full sleeves and a big round collar compliment the look.

Lilja is cosplaying the uniform from the game Katawa Shoujo. The shirt in the game is rather complex, but I simplified things by just topstitching the princess lines rather than cutting them out. The skirt is supposed to be solid rather than striped, but the developers said that the school allows some level of customization with student's clothes, and this was the closest material I had. The ribbon is a bit of decoration pinned to my sewing kit that occasionally cameos on this ensemble.

Now it's Yu Wei, Mariko, and Yu Lian's turn to show off. Yu Wei's jacket isn't as fun as I thought it would be, but it might be more flattering on someone else. My favorite part of the outfit is the skirt anyway. Mariko's was initially for Calla, but it came out way too small. Her skirt is a ribbon I pleated and added a hook and eye to.

Yu Lian's clothes are my attempt at an Alice in Wonderland style uniform. The high collar of her shirt are supposed to lend a serious official air to something that is usually whimsical. There are also pintucks, but that's hard to see beneath the apron. I was seriously waffling on how to include the pinafore into the design, but one of my friends assured me that aprons used to (maybe they still are?) be common elements on girl's uniforms in parts of Eastern Europe. Again, for formality's sake I made it double breasted. The pattern for it I took from Tudor Links The skirt is just another version of the early bustle skirt I've made umpteen times now.

This is what I consider to be Mariko's kindergarten uniform. It got stained some time ago and I haven't yet gotten around to fixing it. Isn't it adorable? It's a jumper with a smock on top.

Summer editions!

Part two, containing non homemade uniforms, is posted here.

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.

Mariko's Old Fashioned Dress.

After spending a little too much time on this lovely woman's website, I got it into my head to make a mid Victorian outfit for Mariko.* According to my research, the shoulders should be dropped, the skirt full, the petticoat stiff, and the drawers should peek out from the bottom. aside from that, there were several bodice and sleeve designs to choose from. I chose a plain ungathered bodice with a jewel neckline and full bishop sleeves (and later worked myself into a near panic after the dress was done as I could not find evidence of bishop sleeves on children. Sigh.)

First, I made the underdress. I draped the bodice on Mariko, stitched it up (hemming shoulders is so annoying on this scale,) cut out the skirt, added the pintucks for stiffness, and sewed the drawers to the entire thing to reduce bulk at the waist.

The bodice for the dress I took from the 1860's bodice from Patterns of Fashion volume 1, which was almost exactly Mariko's size. For decoration, I took inspiration from the girl on the far right. The trim was made with chain crochet stitched on top of some ribbon I had lying around. It later occurred to me that the cuffs might have been better off in plain white rather then echoing the trim, but I had no desire to take apart the entire thing for a little detail like that.

The only major hiccup is that her right hand could not fit through the armscythe. I had to take off her hand and add an S-hook so that it can be easily removed when she goes in and out of it.

What do you think?

*Actually, I made two dresses, but the second one is very plain, so I have few photos of it.

My Beautiful Girl Mariko

I am fond of many animes and mangas. Elfen Lied is one of them, and I thought it would be great if I had a doll of one of the characters. I forget how quickly I came to the conclusion, but I decided on getting a doll based off of Mariko, the little one I like to describe as a "cute homicidal five year old."

Then came the problem of choosing the body. There was one I thought of getting (one of the tiny Doll in Minds,) but I could not tell if she remained in stock by American retailers, and how often the company would make more of this non limited edition girl. Furthermore, this mold is not a popular one, and my casual searching did not find it on the secondhand market. And then I saw on Den of Angels that there was a group order taking advantage of a sale Cherish Doll was holding. The company had tinies, I found one mold pleasing, and I joined the order.

Tada!

Here she is in a homemade skirt and store bought everything else. Here she is in a doll meetup, borrowing a prop.