I have been working steadily on patterns for three small dolls. The dolls’ pictures show up occasionally in this blog. I felt satisfied with the patterns, but decided to make each of the dolls one more time to check the patterns’ accuracy. Friday night I discovered that my latest version of my smallest doll had a body that was much too large. I was afraid that something was wrong with the pattern. Saturday morning I got out my smallest scissors and my seam ripper. I removed the poor doll’s arms, legs, and head. Then I removed all the stuffing from the body. I then compared the body to the body pattern and was relieved to find that the body was larger than the pattern. I hate making mistakes, but I was glad that my mistake was a cutting error. The pattern I had been working on so long was correct.

When I cut a new body I tried out a new rotary cutter that I purchased recently. It has a small blade and cut the tiny pattern pieces accurately. My new Twinkle now has a body transplant and is on her was to being a complete little doll.

My sewing mistake gave me a chance to show how much stuffing it takes to make a firmly stuffed doll. I removed all of the fiberfill shown from the small doll body on the left. Though most of the stuffing expanded when it was removed from the body casing, some of it remained compressed.

The doll body on the left is the body that I cut incorrectly. The smaller body was cut and sewn correctly.

The small rotary cutter at the top of the picture did a good job cutting small doll patterns. The larger cutter is for cutting long straight strips of fabric.

sherralyn my patterns, Pattern Making designing patterns, sewing for small dolls