After making Ginger Flufftail, I made her an apron. I put the apron on her and fell in love with it, so I decided to make myself one.
I loved the circle skirt shape of the pattern for the doll. I looked at patterns online, but nothing seemed quite right and I didn’t want to drive somewhere to print a PDF pattern (I don’t have a printer), so I decided to take the doll pattern and size it up to fit me. The Luna Lapin dolls are 18” tall, and I am 64” tall, so I did a little math and found that I could multiply the doll measurements by 3.5 to get a pattern piece that was appropriate for my height. So that’s what I did.
Once I had drafted my pattern piece, I held it up to myself and made a few adjustments. Then I was ready to go!
I found a gorgeous cotton Duck at Hobby Lobby that had Impressionist Watercolour flowers for the body of the apron, and a coordinating quilting cotton for the binding in a blue spruce colour. There was a limited quantity of fabric, so I cut the strap off my pattern and made this a separate pattern piece. I also had to fold back the edge of my main pattern piece to make it fit on the full width of the fabric, so I lost a little fullness in the skirt.
I am always amazed at how quickly construction is completed in sewing. When knitting, construction takes 95+% of the time spent, whereas in sewing construction could take as little as 5% of total time spent. In this case, construction consisted of four short seams: attaching the straps to the main body, then crossing these over themselves and seaming them onto the apron front. I put the apron on at this point, looked in the mirror, and was enchanted by what I was making!
So on I went to the finishing work. I used an overlock stitch to finish the raw edges of my seams. Then I cut a bunch of bias, ironed it into bias tape, and sewed one side down to the apron. Then I ironed it again and pinned the other edge in place and top-stitched it down. Applying bias to this style of apron is so interesting because there is only one edge, so you can apply the bias all in one pass! I guess this is one of those times when I have to admit that geometry is cool.
With that the apron was finished! I was so happy that it was every bit as swingy as the pattern promised to be! I LOVE how this came out, and I low-key want to make another version that is a standalone dress.
So there you have it – you can take doll clothes and translate them into human clothes with a little math.
Dramatic Lyric 