The First Complete Outfit!

Er, not at this time of writing the only complete outfit, or in fact the first complete garment, but the first bunch of garments that was ready as an ensemble for display. Also, since I am very worthy of my mother's nickname 'Little Bat', and live at the bottom of a valley in the North of England where good light is scarce even when I am awake - the only one I have photos of. With me so far? No? Tough.

It's for Petra!

Both of these garments were made with patterns I found on Pinterest - the t-shirt from puchicollective.com, and the jeans from go-monsterhigh at livejournal. Yes, I will be trying every single pattern I can find, and if it doesn't work, I'll be reviewing exactly how it doesn't work and tweaking it till it does.

Here's the outfit at the back, and already you can see that although it's a pretty cute outfit and I'm pleased with it for a first try, neither garment fits her entirely right. There's reasons for this, so we'll start with the obvious one, which is the t-shirt.

This fabric used to be part of a bag that I had until the strap broke, and the print is of course way too big for a doll garment but I thought it was about the right size for a single motif on a t-shirt. I added the beads and embroidery afterwards. As you can see, though, it rucks up over Petra's shoulders, the neckline is way too high and it needs to curve a bit more to make the fasteners line up at the back.

That's because this is a Blythe pattern. Blythe dolls are the same height as Monster High, but most of that is head, and their bodies are a very different shape. MH torsos are longer and curvier, and Blythe dolls are generally more barrel-chested - a MH doll is a teenager, a Blythe doll is more prepubescent. This T-shirt would probably have been full length on a Blythe, not that I can check, since I don't have £100 to drop on a Blythe doll and if I did I'd buy a Momoko instead. No offense, Blythe lovers, but I find Blythes sort of eerie.

ANYWAY. When I try again with this shirt, it will get a deeper neckline, a couple of tucks just under the bust and also the cap sleeves will either be shortened or clipped away from the body. Maybe both, we'll see which works better. We shall see what it takes to make this pattern fit properly!

Now, the jeans. Front:

And back:

These work... kind of. Until Petra sits down, and then she gets a hell of a builder's bum. That's partly because of me, but mainly because the pattern has the waistline at least half a centimetre too low. What I did wrong was not heeding the fact that this was a PJ pants pattern, meant for stretch fabric, and I made it in medium weight denim that was an off-cut of a pair of jeans (apart from the false pockets and belt loops - that's a denim-look cotton that used to be a quilt cover. I have lots more of that to make doll jeans out of in future).

I have in fact remedied both of these problems, but I don't have photos of the result right now. When I get around to that, you'll see what I did.

But I do intend to use the same pattern to make jeans with in future! With non-stretch fabric! It's OK, I know what I'm doing, I'll put a fly in the next pair and let you know how that goes.

As for the belt, that's pretty much a failure. It looks okay at a glance, but the charm isn't heavy enough to keep it taut and it's too long, so I think I might replace the ring with a lobster catch at some point and see if that works.

Incidentally it may seem like I'm doing nothing but pick apart my work in public here, so let me just say I had a great time making these and I'm actually really proud of them. I'm also getting better with every thing I make so wait till you see everything else!