We all know DressYourDoll as a trendy doll’s fashion brand, with outfits suited to everyone’s taste. There are beautiful evening gowns and cute retro dresses, fun outfits with animal prints and sturdy overalls, stylish cocktail dresses, light spring jackets and colourful rain coats.
If you like to get a bit more creative (we sure do!), there’s our wide array of fabric sets to help you along!
Now, a rainy evening is one of those perfect moments for a cozy sewing session, so we made ourselves some tea, spread out all the fabric sets we could find, and designed this very original, cute and fun outfit… to make your doll into a mermaid!
Doesn’t Barbie look absolutely gorgeous? Like a fish, uhh- mermaid, in the water! And the outfit is so easy to make, too! As you can see, this was made with standard DressYourDoll sizes, but it all fits Barbie perfectly too!
For the “skirt” you simply need to modify a Dolly-pattern to make it longer, and for the top we used a pattern from a Vicky lingerie set. The fabric comes from the "Blue", "Mint", and "Pink" fabric sets, which you can buy here, here, and here.
Here we go!
1 - Cut out a Vicky top.
2 - Cut out two small stars from another color, and, with a few stitches on top of eachother, sew them on the top.
3 - Now sew the back seam of the top shut. This is a top that you have to tie around the neck so don’t sew the upper strands together!
Next, take the Dolly pattern. Better make a copy of it (by going with a pencil around the edges on a piece of paper) because we’re going to cut it in two!
4 - Cut the Dolly pattern as shown in the drawing on the left, in the middle at the narrowest part. We’re going to use the bottom half!
5 - Make it longer and narrower, so fits snuggly around the ankles. Sew closed with one long seam from top to bottom.
6 - Cut out the fins. You can make these any shape you want! Just make sure to have about 1 centimeter or 1/3 inch extra on the top, where we’re going to attach it to the skirt we just made.
If we do a bit of math here: the combined width of the two tail pieces should be as much as the width of the bottom of the pattern of the skirt. So, let’s say, if the skirt pattern is about 8cm (+- 3 inches) wide at the bottom, the top of one fin should be about 4 cm (1,5 inches).
Now sew the pieces together at the sides. You can make the seam go all the way down, but we only went half way so they were still flappy enough. We didn’t close the bottom because we wanted Barbie to still be able to “walk”.
7 - Attach the fins to the skirt like you would attach a circular skirt. For a how-to, look at our previous post!
That’s all there is to it! Now your dolls are ready for an underwater adventure! (Luckily our fabric holds up lovely in water, so don’t worry!)