I am making good progress with the second celebration dress, I can’t show you what I am working on yet but the toile fitted well (work in progress picture with cutting out old bed sheet below).

I spent most of yesterday cutting out and zigzagging the edges of the fabric with these lovely colour threads. Fingers crossed the dress fits tomorrow after I have tacked all the pieces together 🙂

I have got some new toys, some to help with fittings for these types of garments and others for smaller ones so I am very pleased to introduce you to Millie the Mannequin!

I have wanted one for a long time and now that my lovely son Jake is not around to help me with fitting Steampunk attire it has become a necessity so she arrived on Friday and is settling into the sewing room nicely.

I will have to pad her out a bit in the chest area, I ordered a size 16/18 version from Amazon but she has a much smaller bust than me so I will sort that with an old bra and some wadding. I am very excited to use her for my Steampunk creations later in the year.

My other toys are for my ever growing collection of Barbie couture. I wanted to buy some new dolls and I needed some for work as well for a session we are doing on diversity. Barbie have now got a far more diverse range of dolls in different body sizes, skin colours and hair colours so I now have a few additions to my family, to avoid confusion I have given them all different names as we can’t have everyone being called Barbie!

I have also got some new photo backgrounds, I can’t find any of the ones that people use for their Gene Marshall dolls to buy, so I have just got some nice photos from the internet and printed them.I think they look a lot prettier than the black background.

First of all there is Alexa, she is one of the curvy body size dolls and she has fab hair. This dress I made for her out of an old skirt, I added beads to the bodice but all of the embroidery was already on the skirt and it is lined. I think the colour of the dress really suits her hair.

Next is Aisha, she is a petite doll so apologies that the dress she is wearing is not a very good fit. She is a lot shorter and has a much smaller bust than the standard Barbie dolls so I will need to adjust my patterns for her and make her something that fits better.

The dress is one that I have made for a birthday present and is just a simple wrap dress with a Velcro fastening.

Zuri is my last new purchase ( I chose the name as it means beautiful according to my search for African names on Google), she is standard size Barbie with gorgeous brown eyes and is wearing another one of the wrap dresses.

I have also finished the outfit for the friend who also uses Barbie in her teaching. This is Lily and her outfit comes from the latest set of patterns that I bought, this 1960s set. I have used the black suit pattern on the top right here. I did add a waistband rather than elastic as there was not much room to fold over the waist once it was gathered.

I had a lot of trouble with the blouse, I had to re-make it in thinner fabric and am still not completely happy with the neckline but am very pleased with the jacket and the skirt.

Again all this is scrap fabric and the skirt has organza layered over the silk. The flower motif on the blouse is again from an old bra, I have lots of this lace left so am going to feature it in many more outfits.

I shall be spending the rest of the weekend tacking the celebration dress for a fitting tomorrow but hope to get a couple more Barbie outfits cut out this week as well as I need to get two more dresses made for presents in the next few weeks.

I think I may go for the green dress in the picture above for one of them. The neckline does look super fiddly but I am up for the challenge!

I hope you are having a lovely creative weekend as well, take care, have a nice week ahead and thanks for visiting.