Part One:

This was the latest candidate for new clothes. She is an unmarked vinyl doll that came from the same lady as Lori. Apart from her lack of eyelashes and a bit of discolouration she is not in bad shape. I’d guess she is 1960s or perhaps early 70s and that she might be an Australian Pedigree doll as they were usually unmarked. So far she doesn’t have a name but during the course of making her outfit I hope I’ll think of one.

She already has a pair of panties as the ones that were too small for Lori fit her quite well. She is about 46cm but slimmer. I am going to make her a dress from the same booklet as Lori’s outfit. The patterns are actually for 35-40cm dolls but I can always lengthen the dress a bit or not downsize the needles. I like to knit in 8ply wool because it knits up quickly but when I get to the smaller dolls I’ll probably switch to 3 or 4 ply wool or cotton. I have baby wool for the baby dolls. I generally only use knitting cotton for fashion dolls now because it is less bulky on them.

I have yet to choose a colour for her dress but I think it will be blue, turquoise, or sea green.

Part Two:

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This is the dress I wanted to make. I’ve included a picture of the pattern book that both this outfit and Lori’s came from but not enough of the pattern for anyone to copy. It is a nice fitted little dress. It is supposed to be short but I decided to add about three extra rows at the waist to make it a bit longer.However, when I tried it on the doll I didn’t like the way it looked. It fitted beautifully but it was so short that it barely covered her panties.

However, I have other dolls waiting for dresses so I went to get one of them who is much shorter. On her it fitted just the way I wanted it to.

The dress is not quite finished. I have to press it and add buttons at the back, or I may use hooks which will save the bother of making button holes. I’m not going to crochet around the neck either but I may add some lace or something instead.

I really thought that colour would work well on a redhead though and I still have some wool left so I sat down to work out how to properly adapt the pattern for a taller doll. I didn’t want to use larger needles because the body fit so well. She is a slim doll with a torso the same size as the smaller one but longer legs.

I looked at the pattern and decided that if I knit five rows of stocking stitch between decreases instead of three I would gain about ten more rows in the skirt area.That ought to be enough to make the skirt the right length for her.

Will it work? Will I have enough wool to make a larger dress? You will have to wait until next week after I’ve tried it to find out. In the meantime here are some photos of the dress. By the way the small blonde doll is marked “Made in England” on the back of her head. She reminds me a lot of the type of dolls that Naomi and I had as children.