Birkat Chaverim Blog

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. I had been eyeing the top of a sock that was a remnant from a sock made into a skirt and dress for Barbie. It looked a bit Peter Pan-ish. In the end I measured Barbie’s head, cut a piece of elastic, slightly smaller than her head, and sewed it in a circle inside the sock. This is the circumference of the Barbie head.

I tried to make sure that the elastic was stretched to the length of the sock material (if that makes sense,) so it would fit Barbie’s head afterwards. Once the elastic was sewn in, I trimmed the sock seam, did a bit of cutting here and there, added a feather, and voila! Barbie has a stylish hat. The (child) recipient of this hat was quite pleased. As I was writing this post she said, “That’s my baby!” For her all dolls and bears are babies.

Materials used:
Top of an old sock
Elastic
Feather
needle and thread

You may use whatever embellishments you wish. We may add a ribbon or flower at some point.

I forgot to mention that although baby and kids socks generally are too small for Build a Bears, they do make great appliques. The girls were quite creative in what they wanted to use in their designs. The second week, some of the girls finished up their projects from the week before. One girl decided to bring in felt to make a dress and headdress (no pictures, she already took it home.)

The rest of us started to design our own patterns for Build a Bear shorts. I showed them the shorts I had made for my daughter and the little applique I had topstitched onto them. I also brought out a bunch of her clothes, because baby and toddler clothing always have such cute embellishments and I thought it would spark ideas. I brought out several pairs of shorts so we could look at how they were constructed. Then I brought out paper. We looked at the shorts and estimated how much smaller we would want them to be. We also estimated a length and where the crotch should be. Then we designed the cut for our shorts. In the first pattern we forgot to add seam allowance, but we kept that in mind when we measured the fabric. The other patterns included seam allowance.

Then we got to measuring our patterns against old tshirts. What I love about this is that given the girls are not in love with a huge amount of hand sewing, we save time on the hem and sides of the pants.

We opened the pieces and pinned them together. The idea is for the girls to sew the center seams and then open the pants again and sew up the crotch.

Sock bathing suit

I showed the girls the Barbie clothing (see post on birth of chug for picture)  and Build a Bear outfit (currently unphotographed.) Barbies have a really large selection of clothing choices- baby socks make great shirts, children’s socks have great colors and patterns and are easy skirts or pants. With a little sewing men and women’s socks become sophisticated dresses, sweaters or pants. The top of socks can become barrettes or winter hats. In another post I’ll show an example of a hat.
The Build a Bears (or other bears of that size) are larger- they seem to come in two sizes.

Glove as Barbie skirt

When the girls were looking for socks to use for their clothing in the pile of socks, I asked them to make sure that they pulled the socks over the bears hips to be sure that their outfit was going to fit. Mostly that left us with black or white sport socks, but we did have an occasional find of other color winter sport socks or children’s socks with extra stretch. The bear sporting the bathing suit was lucky enough to encounter a stretchy child’s sock. There was also a cute grey sports sock which was made into a dress. Most of the girls did not finish their outfits in the first week.

I hadn’t run a doll clothing workshop ever, and its been a while since i’ve run craft classes for children. I came up with a list of what I thought we might do and figured we’d play it by ear:

Sock and stocking shirts, pants- I bought some ready made felt and fabric applique items to decorate
elasticized shirts
foam hats and flip flops
felt shoes
bags, watch, wallet
hair and other accessories

That was the original list. So far We’ve done sock items (dresses, skirts, shirts, and a bathing suit!) for Build a Bear and Barbie. I then made these shorts for my daughter out of a tshirt and decided that we should do that next. The girls asked  to do t-shirt skirts next, but as you’ll see that hasn’t quite happened. Eventually we’ll do skirts from sleeves and circle skirts.I asked the girls to bring doll/bear and junk! Unmatched socks, old ratty clothing or whatever their folks wanted to throw out. They are enjoying turning “garbage” into neat stuff.

The naked Barbies was point A. Then my niece N was sick. My daughter and I went over to visit and do some projects with her for her Build a Bear. She’s pretty creative and the result of that was a really cute outfit out of a black sock and a sock flower embellishment.

In our neighbourhood, Build a Bears are pretty popular and clothing out of scraps from home was a big hit with parents, so our class was born. So far we are all enjoying it and everyone comes up with great ideas. I actually find it relaxing. Some of the girls are really getting into it and liked the idea of documenting what we were doing. They would also like to sell clothing that they make. I think it would be a great party idea with some clothing being made for hospitals or families in need.

This chug or workshop evolved from a gift to my daughter of naked Barbies and because my niece was sick.

She received a bunch of hand-me-down toys (we love hand me downs- reuse, recycle!) including three Barbies, with only one outfit. While I don’t particullary mind when some of her other baby dolls end up without a stitch of clothing, I am not such a fan of naked Barbies.Â
I began to search for quick clothing options for Barbie. Since my sewing machine is still in storage, that meant crochet or handsewing. There are some great crochet patterns and sewing patterns available for free on the internet such as at bevscountrycottage.com. My goal was to use stuff I already had at home, I was mostly thinking about crochet since I already do toys for my daughter and her friends (think frog puppets around Pesach etc.) Then I stumbled on a few posts about using socks for Barbie clothing, and then doll clothing. My initial foray into Barbie sock clothing was a dress from a lonely men’s sock (see picture).
I then stumbled upon a blog with sock clothing suggestions and made the sweater that Barbie two is wearing, from a white sport sock.
My two year old was extremely pleased. I was actually surprised with how much she loved it. I eventually also made a skirt and sweater outfit. What I love about these outfits are they are really quick to make and fairly forgiving.
I showed the clothing to my nieces who really enjoyed the idea, but since my daughter’s Barbies were formerly their Barbies, it wasn’t per say a practical thing for them.

More about this next time…