Princess Dress Pattern for Curvy Barbie
I love Miss Blue’s beautiful space princess hair. Of course my first dress for her had to be a princess seams sundress. Princess seams are not a very easy design to create. I set out to do a strapless at…
Janel
Make Charted Needlework Graphs in Adobe Illustrator CS5 using Live Paint
The goal was to make a square chart for cross-stitch or needlepoint by tracing a background image onto a grid. I found various methods to make the chart, but nothing about how to color it other than resorting to something…
Barbie 28 inch Peasant Top and Hawaiian Dress
Here’s another dress pattern to make your own outfits for Best Fashion Friend Barbie. NOTE this is NOT the regular height Barbie, this is the big 28 inch super sized one! But not 36 inch My Size Barbie either. I…
Barbie 28 inch Best Fashion Friend Classic Dress
I realize this is Thanksgiving week and there are a lot of grandmas out there who need some 28″ Barbie clothing in a hurry, so I’m sharing this pattern for you, in its unfinished state. I’m planning to do more…
Sushi Cushion to Sew
Here’s a great project from a reader named Susan. She wanted to sew a sushi pillow as a gift for her grandson, and happened across my spirals page while looking for ideas. I had no idea “sushi pillow” was a…
My New Pfaff Sewing Machine
From May 2009. I’m putting it back because it is still one of my favorite stories! I went to the free swap at the library, bringing my bags of old junk and expecting some other, fresher and thus more fun…
Music-Themed Spiral Skirt
Dramatic black, white and red music-themed fabric chosen by a musician. I only have a couple photos while it was in progress. Hopefully one day I’ll have a photo of it being worn! This was made from the patterns on…
Adult Size Spiral Dress
Here’s a full length spiral dress for a grown-up woman! …with wolves on it. Long ago, I found a spiral dress at a second hand shop. It was too small for me, but I was so fascinated with those seams…
Free Peasant Dress Pattern for 18″ Girl Doll
To my delight, I was gifted a Paradise Kids 18″ doll that needed some clothing. I got right to work making her something. Here we are with a basic peasant dress, but this is only the beginning. I have something…
Crocheting for Relaxation
Yarn is a very good thing for PTSD symptoms 🙂 Here’s my latest scrapghan project. No, that’s the old one! I started that long ago, at the other place, and had worked on it in little bits for so many…
A Better Spiral Crochet Granny Square
I found lots of ideas that were cool and artistic, but they seem to be more complex, more work and less “granny”. The beauty of the granny square is its utter simplicity. I wanted that same classic shape, only in…
Child Size Spiral Dress
Ruffles! A huge, swirly overload of fluttering spiral. How to do this? We need volume of fabric. As usual, I started moderate before going more extreme. The first attempt with a 4″ curved gore produced a conservative A-line skirt shape.…
Barbie Best Fashion Friend Strapless Dress Pattern
Free pattern for a basic strapless dress that can be made any length. Note this is for the LARGE 28-inch Barbie doll, not the regular size 11.5″ ones. Those patterns are elsewhere. Download and print the PDF pattern here —…
Barbie Body Types to 2008
Summary of all the different Barbie body types up to 2008 (when I made this page). It was after that when they came out with the Fashionistas tall, petite, curvy etc. Classic / Vintage / Original / Traditional shape –…
Quilt As You Go Potholders
Easy and quick homemade scrapwork potholders make great DIY gifts! You don’t need a pattern and they’re FREE to make out of fabric scraps. Most of the instructions I found for quilted potholders use bias binding, like commercial potholders. But…
Women’s Peasant Dress Pattern
Free printable peasant dress pattern for adult females, usually termed Misses. The correct word for grown up girls is “women”. That word isn’t code for larger sizes. Unmarried misses aren’t guaranteed to be thin either, unfortunately. Pattern in sizes Sm,…
Round Ripple Crochet Afghan Pattern with Diagram
When I first searched for instructions there were many, of course, but none of them worked out for me. Finally I found this one little image that was detailed enough to see what was going on, so I followed it.…
Round Knit Dishcloth Pattern
Cool round doily style cotton dishrag or mat, written out to be ultra simple for non-knitters like me I saw someone making one of these and got stars in my eyes. She was kind enough to write down the instructions…
Mailbag
Photos of finished projects that people sent in to the old version of this site. I'm uploading them again here because they're all so artistic!
Free Patterns for Tyler Wentworth
I made a bunch of outfits all at once when I needed them for gifts, and here I’m going to share the patterns. These are for the 16″ Tyler Wentworth, here modeled on a Tonner Brenda Starr doll. The white…