When my friend Kerry came over during the summer she commented on the fact that I had all of the Barbie dolls that I had been making clothes for lined up on the coffee table in front of me. She said it looked like I was using them as an audience and I told her that was my B Crew and yes I did occasionally talk to them 🙂 Well when you live on your own you have to be creative sometimes for company.

The B Crew have been disbanded now as they are mostly off to new homes. I spent many happy hours during the first few weeks of the restrictions in April making clothes for them all, (I ended up with 10 dolls at one point with those I bought for work purposes and the ones I found on Ebay).

Once I have finished with the animals that I am making as gifts for friend’s grandchildren, I will probably get back to making gowns for them as the recent declutter led to me finding a whole new stash of beautiful fabric that I can use. I bought some wonderful vintage patterns in PDF from Gail’s Vintage Doll e-Patterns on Etsy and have so many other ones to try. I love these very sixties ones.

For these dresses I made four versions of the dress on the top left of the pattern, View 5. For the white and green dress I adapted the skirt to be flared. The other print dresses were made from two rectangles with the skirt part gathered.

These three dolls are going to the cousins for Christmas and three of the diversity ones have gone to my friend at work. She is using Barbies in awareness raising about diversity in art galleries, so they will join her Art Activist Barbie team. I love what Sarah has been doing with her work, if you are interested here is her Twitter page.

I have kept four of them as models, and this is one of my favourite as I love her hair. I must make her some fab new clothes for next season as the poor thing only has one dress at the moment.

I have also finished my two snowmen, here are Frosty and Freezy. The last photos show them filled with chocolate and ready to go off to my nieces for Christmas. I think they turned out really well and I very much enjoyed knitting them. Details of the pattern is in this post here.

I actually had the whole of this weekend off (eek) as all of my teaching on Saturdays for this term has finished. It was so lovely to have two whole days off, so exciting! I managed to get a lot done, sorting out some more of the things in the craft room and made up this pouch for Ellen’s friend. I have had the applique done for a long time but it was on my pile of things to make up (which includes a large pile of stitcheries that I must get around to doing something with!).

I love the Liberty fabric I used for the bottom of the bag, it is one of my favourite designs and I wish I had more of it but think it looks cute as just the base. There is a good tutorial for this and other types of lace zipper pouch here at Plush Addict. The lace zippers come from Buddly Crafts and come in all sorts of gorgeous colours.

I am not expecting to get too much else done this week as I have a lot of wrapping and general Christmas prep to do and may (only may) be leaving the country on Saturday. All manner of miracles have to happen to make that work so we shall see. If I am blogging again next week it will not have happened but fingers crossed!

Whatever happens I will be happily knitting something somewhere and celebrating getting to the end of a very tough year, both personally and professionally, as it has for many people. Whatever happens next year at least this one will be over, in some cases the worst has already happened and we have survived that. We can only hope that things get easier for us all in 2021.

If I don’t see you again until Jan, hope you have a good a festive season as you can, take care, stay safe and thanks for visiting.