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I have been able to do knitting outside my doll hobby, but this is not the case for sewing. The only way to motivate myself to sew has been with the goal of making clothes for my dolls. Last few years I have been working on my knitting skills, so coming to 2026 I wanted to push myself to level up my sewing skills. Mind you I haven't sewn much in a decade, so starting again was a daunting task. Can I still sew the same as I once could?
Turns out years of not sewing, did not take away the cultivated skills and knowledge I had, although I was incredebly rusty and felt somewhat lost at how to go about it. I have always been kind of a freestyler when it comes sewing. I used to pretty much study my already owned clothes in order to copy them (though in doll sizes) and figure out how to cut the pieces with right size by first wrapping the doll in the fabric. I never really used any patterns or drawn pattern drafts, though the result were decent enough for me. This time around I wanted to draw patterns and use the available information online, instead of staring by myself at a clothing I have and figure out how to make it by the seams.
The challenge I set for myself was to make pants with pockets. Pants with outside and inside seams and with little overall detail, I have done. Pants with pockets? No chance in hell. I found Raaksbox's brookside barrel pants sewing tutorial on youtube and followed it using an old dear shirt of mine for fabric. I thought about making jeans with pockets, but I think it would be better keep it simple by only having making pockets being a new thing to learn. This way it would not be too overwhelming.
Now my girl has a working pair of pants with pockets!!! It was surprisingly fun to do, and now my aversion of making pockets feel silly, haha. It really wasn't that complicated. I did differ from RaaksBow's tutorial when it came to the waistband and pant legs. I skipped the hemming the leg openings with elastic band and kept them wide legged. This pair's legs ended a bit shorter than I intended, so I am thinking of doing another similar barrel pants, but with a elastic band also on the legs. However this was a success, and I am looking forward making another pair of pants with pockets!
this knitted top was made in spring to match the bonnet you can see on the picture and was inspired by top I found on Pinterest made by kniitslip. There is no instructions for it, but I used a previous form-fitting raglan knit top as a guide line for sizing and selected three different yarns for it. In fact, on the lighter stripes I used the remaining yarn from the first knitted sweater I did for the torso and the lower half of arms and a light violet yarn for the collar and upper half of the arms. This is how on the light colored stripes, there is both a soft color change and harsh color change where I wanted it to be. On the dark stripes, I only used one consistent dark-blue color. I am overall happy with the results, even though the arm increases can make it a bit funny looking in certain angels. The biggest con, however, is that it is almost impossible to put on, because I did not make any openings in the back to ease it on...
One of the important findings I did early this year was to come across Evvia's Stripey Raglan pattern. I fell quickly in love with it and I found myself making two stripey raglan cardigans with it for my Doll Chateau Stacy (and one more that ended up unfinished since it was a bit too big). This knitted pattern taught me how to make a raglan pattern sweater/cardigan with two different methods of increases. And since then I have been able to use this method as a base for other sweaters and cardigans of my own design. Evvia's video tutorial is very helpful alongside the pdf instructions. Honestly as somewhat of a beginner knitter, Evvia's videos on knitting overall have been very informative and helped me how to stylize and knit more freely. Very hard recommend for those who know the basics of knitting and is wanting to make actual garments with knitting.
Honestly one of the biggest pains of knitting for a Doll Chateau doll is the length of the arms... As you can see, arms on the cardigan remain awkwardly short...
This month I have been working on sewing and practising doing faceups. I once again used Cam's Station undertone tutorials (link in references) as a guideline, otherwise I did not have a particular plan. I wanted to stay with a pretty natural look and focus on working from broad areas to smaller finishing touches. First I redid my oldest doll's, Bobobie Pixie's, face up and a lying around minifee shushu head's face up as a practice. Sadly the progress pictures of minifee shushu head are all blurred, so I am not sharing them here. I will likely take a better picture of it later and add it to the faceup page. Either way, I went for a "sunburned" look for the shushu head. I had to redo Pixie's undertone base, because I applied the pastels too harshly first time around. I ended up doing four layers on her. I think her face up ended up being pretty fine, though I am not certain I like the eye shadow, eye liner and eye lashes. I am already planning on redoing her face up something down the line, but for now it will do:
In march 2026, I got my new girl Coralreef Candidum and she has remained barefaced for a good while. It was a lot more nerve-wrecking to start working on a brand new doll, but I did the previous face ups in order to build some confidence before touching my new doll. Doing her face up had a rough start, I first dropped her head while standing almost to the ground (managed to redirect the fall onto a table surface while trying to catch it). Then while setting up my face up station I managed to get dark smudges on the forehead and the back of head that were very hard to get rid off. It felt like an impossible mission from the start. I also found myself being a bit too hesitant to apply color, so the colors did not build as much I would like. Total layers I did was 4.
While I can see the areas where I could improve on, I am very proud of the result. I have never been good at using brush on small precise details, which I struggled with also on the previous face ups, but I think I finally managed to figure out how to make tiny lines with a brush, especially on a uneven sculpt. Sure the lines could be more confident and clearer, but I am overall satisfied with result.
My biggest project was to make my first knitted sweater. I had a thin yarn hanging around in my closet perfect for my 1/3 girl. I wanted to use a blue yarn thats tone changes from blues to brown, along with black and white yarn in order to create a shirt that has softness with high contrast areas. I found a nice pattern on Pinterest that I wanted to use as reference for the pattern. There wasn't much context for the pattern found in pinterest post other than the pinterest's suggested similar knit suggestion, which made me suspect that this pattern was a popular western knit pattern decades ago. I still decided on using the pattern and twist it a little. Would the small details pop up the same, if I decreased the sections a little? This sweater was mainly a learning project, so I wanted to not only learn how to knit a top but also to analyse how this pattern was made and what exactly about it drew me in. It was a learning project in two regards, so to speak.However, only now writing on this project diary, I realized that I could use google image search to try find the original source for the pattern. Turns out it was created by Jessie Wilson during the first world war. In fact the pattern belongs to a Sanquhar knitting tradition in Scotland, that popularized in the 1700s among the common people and that has survived through times due to its highly intricate and varifying patterns that are hard to replicate with industrial machines. The irony of this finding is that one of the reason I picked this pattern was because while I looove many national knitting traditions (especially baltic knits) I did not want to use one for this garment. (This is because I wanted to avoid using a pattern that had a cultural significance that would be easily lost on me...) Turns out the pattern, that I thought was the more commercial pick of the patterns I came across on pinterest, was also a national knitting pattern...
The bottom hem has a problem of rolling up because I did not realize to do a couple rows of knit-purl-knit (or whatever you call it in english...). I am happy with the over-all sizing and the arms turned out pretty nicely. To summarize what I learned from this project:
I haven't done any face ups in like a decade, and based on my last attempts at face ups, I did not have high hopes at painting my Doll Chateau's Stacy. She has been with a blank face since she arrived, which my indecisiveness regarding her character did not help with. Last year I found Cam's Station that had a lot of useful tutorials for face ups, especially their undertone tutorial helped me a lot. The main problem for me then was the fact that my doll had a greenish gray skin tone, and Cam's station tutorials along with many other face up tutorial on Youtube or Den of Angeles used white or normal pink skin tones as their bases. The face ups on grey skin tones I could find on the internet only consisted of blueish grey dolls, and not greenish grey, like my doll's.
So, I decided to do a test face up without particular plan in regards to the final result. The only goal in mind was to create depth with undertones and figure out a natural looking color scheme for Doll Chateau gray skin tone. I followed the Cam's Station undertone tutorial, but essentially limited the range of color scheme somewhat. I avoided red tones and thus restricted myself to oranges and yellows when painting the blushing. Overall, I stuck to the warm tones.
I use a sealant that I once read online might not handle multiple layers well, and in some cases has resulted in damages. Though this was not in regards to resin or ball-jointed dolls, so I still decided to remain cautious and only did 2 layers of face up. Here are the progress picture from start to finish:
Honestly it might not seem much (as the finished result doesn't really pick on camera and I did not do any eyebrows or eyelashes etc), but I was very astounished and satisfied with the results. It did caught me by surprise how much of a difference doing an undertone base layer with blues, greens and yellows make. Like how much of a difference you can see when comparing the first two pictures (blank base on the left and undertone base on the right). Even with the very minimalistic face up, I think she does look great, though that might because of how much I love the sculpt... I am happy with the result, but I do plan on workshopping her character and face up design before redoing the face up again. Now I at least understand how to work with her specific grey skin tone and how to create depth within it.
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PROJECTS DIARY
PROJECTS DIARY