Adam's Doll-Related Blog

This entry shows how I went about making a bikini bottom pattern for the Tonner Antoinette body. The pattern in the following PDF is at the actual size generated by this process, but is intended to be used with stretch knit materials, and scaled down appropriately for the amount of stretch of the material chosen. If printed and sewn at actual size from knit fabric, the bottoms will have a loose fit. I typically scale down to 90% in the left-right direction when making these from knit t-shirt type material. If using a woven fabric with no stretch at all, a slit with closure may be needed down the back, or side closures, in order to get them onto the doll (I’ve only ever used stretchy materials).

 
Example of finished product made with the pattern from this tutorial:

 
The objective of this pattern is to provide the approximate shapes needed, experimentation is required to get a perfect fit for any particular fabric.

 
Pattern Download (PDF): cami_bikini.pdf

 
The supplies include: doll, masking tape, #11 scalpel (best) or fine-point x-acto knife, scanner, Adobe Illustrator or comparable drawing software.

 
The first step is to tape over the bottom of the doll like a diaper, making sure to overlap the leg joints

 
Then, carefully cut at the joint edges, without cutting your doll. A scalpel is much better for this than most hobby knifes (x-acto) because the sharper blade means less pressure and sawing motion are required.

 
After the leg holes are trimmed, I marked lines where I would want the garment to actually be. I have two lines drawn: higher one for panties, and a lower one for bikini bottoms.

 
On the side, I mark a line for the seam, which lines up with the seam on the doll’s body.

 
I’m extra careful cutting this seam. Notice how the blade is pointed away from the doll. I do this by cutting while lifting the tape away from the doll, without the blade riding along and scoring the doll.

 
Peel the tape off in one piece, and stick it to a sheet of paper. If your software and scanner combo don’t exactly preserve sizes of things, you might wish to first mark a scale on the paper with a ruler, for adjusting once the pattern is scanned.

 
Her I’ve brought the scan of the tape piece into Adobe Illustrator as a guide layer, and I’ve started placing a crude outline (key points).

 
I’ve used the Bezier handles on the points to fit curves to the tape shape. Because the tape piece is not perfectly symmetrical, I’ve chosen one side to represent the pattern, and I’m ignoring the right side.

 
Duplicate the left side outline, join into one shape.

 
Lastly, because I’m going to be using materials that have pattern or grain, I’m separating the pattern into a front and back piece, with a seam at the bottom of the garment. I used the offset outline command to add a 5mm border around each piece, for seam allowance. This is the drawing that I print and pin or transfer to my fabric. If I’m using a material without grain direction, the drawing above can be used as the 1-piece pattern.

 
When I got my latest dolls, who are Integrity Toys FR:16s, I realized that there was a shortage of things made just for them, including shoes and stockings. So, I decided to make stockings rather than try to find ones from another 16″ doll line by trial and error, which could be expensive and possibly also a waste of time.

I also could not find any tutorials on the entirety of the internet that show clearly and specifically how to make doll stockings from very stretchy material. If such tutorials exist, they are not readily Google-able. The best I could find were some sock-making instructions for American Girl dolls, which featured regular cotton knit material and did not tell me what I needed to know.

This blog entry is a tutorial, showing how I went about making the stockings for my Saskia Tate FR:16 doll. The techniques here can be used for any sized doll or action figure.

Disclaimer: I’m not a tailor, couturier or any other kind of fashion professional; I’m a video game programmer who likes to make stuff. So if something here is done in an unconventional way, well, there is your explanation There are probably other ways to do this. Better ways even. In fact, I’d love to hear any ideas you might have for improvements. I came up with this process in a virtual information vacuum, with some help from my wife and from general sewing FAQ sites.

Making the Pattern

I don’t have a pattern for stockings for the FR:16 doll, so I had to make one. I didn’t expect it to be perfect on the first try, since I’m using a very springy 4-way-stretch material and just guessing at how much stretch to allow for, but it ended up working out pretty well. Normally, I’d do the following process entirely on the computer, from a reference photo traced and manipulated in Adobe Illustrator, but to make a simpler tutorial that doesn’t require any software or software expertise, I worked with good old fashioned pencil and paper. First, I traced the doll’s leg:

 
The outline:

 
The following 4 photos show how I manipulated the outline into a shape that has a flat edge and is scaled down to allow for stretch of the material. First, I drew a line from the top of the leg section to the tip of the toe, to form the new "front edge" of the stocking pattern:

 
Then, I drew a new "back edge" of the stocking, essentially moving this edge over the the left by the same amount as the offset between the new and old “front” edges. The light horizontal lines I drew are the key points where I re-plotted the back edge. At each of these horizontal lines, I measured the gap between the new and original front edge lines, and then plotted the point for the new position of the back edge to the left by this same amount. The "=" in the drawing shows an example of how these offsets are equal:

 
In this next step, I drew the new top line for the stocking, about 90% down from the top to allow for vertical stretch. I also drew a smooth curve along the newly-plotted back edge, also pulled in a bit to allow for stretch (to about 80% in this direction). I’ve seen a lot of doll stocking patterns, and I freehand drew the curves based on how doll stocking patterns usually look:

 
Then, I inked over the pencil sketching with pen:

 
I cut out the shape, and marked it "FR:16". This is the finished pattern:

Sewing

I cut out two pieces of black spandex "power mesh", a material I got in the dance and activewear fabrics section of Jo-Ann’s. This material is a 4-way-stretch material, but it has a bias. If you look closely at the material, it has straight lines in one direction, and staggered lines in the other, like a tiny brick wall pattern. When this type of fabric is used for stockings, the straight lines should run top-to-bottom, like the brick wall is on its side.

 
The following product is very important. This type of stretch material cannot be sewing in a sewing machine without a stabilizer backing. The product I use irons on and tears away. There are also stabilizers that stick on like tape, and some that are water-soluble and wash away in hot water. Use what you’re most comfortable with, but use some kind of stabilizer:

 
Update: Since making this tutorial, which used Sulky Totally Stable, I’ve found that Pellon’s Fuse-n-Tear works a little bit better because it’s lighter weight and requires less heat and time to fuse.

 
Here I have ironed the stabilizer onto the mesh fabric. If your fabric has a right and wrong sides (outward and inward facing on the finished product respectively), then iron the stabilizer onto the "wrong" side because we’re going to fold this in half to sew it, and turn it right-side out after we’re done:

 
After ironing the stabilizer paper to the fabric, I folded each piece over and ironed a crease, to make it easier to identify the middle:

 
Next, I traced the pattern onto the stabilizer paper using a fine-point Sharpie. I only need the full pattern on one side, the side that faces up when I sew it. You’ll see that I traced the top part onto both sides, so that I’d know where to attach the elastic:

 
And attach the elastic I did! I used 1/4" braided elastic banding that has a nice little sheer trim on it. I pinned this down to the top of the stocking, on what will be the outward-facing side of the stockings:

 
I held the pinned pieces up to a light, to verify that the elastic was pinned accurately. I’m a bit of a perfectionist:

 
I set up the sewing machine for a zig-zag stitch with 2.5mm width and 1.0mm stitch length for sewing on the elastic banding. Don’t sew your elastic on with a straight stitch, it will not stretch anymore if you do this and you’ll be a very unhappy camper with stockings that are too tight to fit on your doll!

 
For the back (main) seam of the stocking, a small straight stitch will work, because you want a thin seam and very little stretch is needed overall. I used a 1.8mm stitch (3.5mm width setting here is not used by this stitch):

 
Sewing the stocking seam (still from video):

 
Here’s what it looks like after both stitching passes. I recommend triple stitching both the toe and the seam where the elastic ends meet, for extra strength, by sewing over the area forward, then in reverse, then forward again (all in the same pass). You can click on this photo to see it much larger:

 
After sewing, cut the loose threads and cut a small (1/8" or 2mm) seam allowance:

 
Now comes the fun part of tearing away the tear-away stabilizer. OK, actually it’s not fun at all, it’s a pain the ass. Do this by hand, because if you use tools you risk ripping out stitching by accident. Expect this to take at least 5 minutes per stocking:

 
Now trim the excess material off above the elastic top:

 
Nearly done! Turn the stockings right-side out, I insert my Sharpie to do this:

Finished Product!

 
Click to see large:

Ever since my first encounter on Flickr with repainted dolls–the first being a Lilith repaint by OOAKPARK–I knew that someday I would not be happy with just making unique custom clothing and shoes for my doll, but that I’d have to actually make the dolls unique. This past weekend, I finally went for it. I solicited for doll painting advice from folks on Doll Divas and Pink Parlor, absorbed all I could from the tutorials fed to me, and ran with it. A.C. Moore had a 40% off sale on all things Liquitex, so I took advantage of that to get some quality paints and mediums.

 
Here is the big step that took me a long time to get up the nerve to do: wipe the face off my $120 Poppy Parker without actually knowing if my repaint attempt would turn out acceptable, or if my hands would shake, my paint would blob up and I’d end up hurling Poppy’s head at the bin. Rest assured though, had the latter happened, I would not have blogged about it. The fact that you’re reading this means things turned out OK

 
Fortunately, once I got started, I found that my hands were not shaky, and that I had a clear favorite among the brushes I bought: The Princeton Select 10/0 Short Liner from A.C. Moore. I’ll be getting more of these brushes for sure, they are wonderfully pointed, stiff and easy use like writing with a fine pen.

 
I did the eyewhites first (with very light grey), and dark red on the lips. By the time I took this first step photo, I had done the eyebrows as well, with a brown primarily of raw umber. When the lips dried, I added lighter shade vertical strokes for lip creases, and darker brown hair lines to the eyebrows:

 
Here I’ve added eyeliner (black) and dark blue base for the irises. As you can see from the underside of her eyes, the 10/0 liner can do very fine, nice lines.

 
On sunday, I set to work adding color to Poppy’s eyes about every two hours. I built up her irises from increasingly like shades of blue (mix of ultramarine, emerald green and TiO2 white). Then I did the black pupil dots and eyelashes, then finally the white specular highlights in the eyes. Of all the work, the eyelashes are what I’m least happy with. I need to find a 20/0 or 18/0 brush (or smaller) that is as good as my 10/0. The one I used was a La Corneille, which which was too soft bristled.

 
Here Poppy’s head is sitting for overnight drying of her varnish (gloss on the lips and eyes, matte everywhere else):

 
And that is how she turned out! Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised. I showed absolutely no knack for painting on 2D canvases, and did not really have high hopes for my attempt to repaint a tiny doll head freehand. But I’m happy with how she looks, and excited to do the next one even better! I have much to learn to make repaints like the ones I’ve really admired from Park and Jon Copeland in particular. I need to learn to use transparency, and how to thin for brush-stroke-free fills. I’ve ordered a 2.5X magnifying visor to help with doing the iris details, I’m told this really helps.

Michelle bought me some iron-on, tear-away Sulky stabilizer, and the world of stretch knits opened up to me! I’ve got a ball-point needle in the machine now too. On order: a straight-stitch foot and needle plate, and a Teflon foot for working with grippy fabrics.

Here is my second sewing attempt, the same shirt from the Doll Coordinate Recipe beginner book, but this time from a 96% Cotton, 4% Spandex two-way stretch knit. I still need to select and add a closure. I think the next one I make will be altered slightly too, I’d like it to be a little more form fitting and not so wide at the shoulders:

Lacy holds the first draft in her hand: