Saturday 24 February 2007

Who could resist?

Yesterday at skating a lovely young friend of mine happened to mention that her Barbie had no clothes. Well....who could resist this...not a person who likes to make things....and certainly not a person who likes to make things and has no little girl of her own. So when I got home I thought I would try my hand at knitting Barbie a skirt, seemed to me that a tube skirt would be a simple sort of thing to start with. Right?

Well, you know how sometimes in your mind you get this great idea, and it seems like it will look pretty cool and then when you try and do it....well, not so much. In my head lots of different colour stripes would look really great for a Barbie skirt, and interesting textured yarns would be even better. After a couple of attempts at figuring out how many stitches she would need to fit around her body I started adding in different colours and yarns until I figured out that a Barbie skirt is pretty tiny and, with the way I knit, there isn't a lot of room for all that. At any rate, Barbie ended up with a dress instead, and I am fairly pleased with how it turned out for my first attempt.

Notes to self for next time - smaller needles, less colours, use one kind of yarn, don't use yarn with lots of bits that hang off it and get tangled in so you can't tell what is a stitch and what is a bit, and maybe even see if anyone has some sort of pattern that you could use.

Here is a close up with the flower snap I put on:

This is the whole dress:



What's that? She'd work much better with two legs, you say! Yes, I know, where were you to tell that to my nasty big brother 30-odd years ago. Anyway, she worked well enough as a model to give me an idea of where to start. Now I am ready to try some more creations.

5 comments:

Samantha said...

Mean brother!! I'm doing the thankful-to-have-been-an-only-child happy dance right now.

Great job on the outfit Heather! Soon you'll be designing your own patterns and we can make that knitting book we've talked about!

Samantha said...

Another thought, would your boys Bionicle's like some fancy outfits??

Nicola said...

I had a good laugh at your one legged doll! But her dress is lovely. I have ordered the 'knitted clothes for Barbie" book from the library so we can make some more stuff for Z.

Anonymous said...

Z will love it! What a great, original outfit! You guys are so thoughtful!
xojacq

Katherine said...

Barbie is ready for Spring! Very cute dress, too bad about her missing leg. My brother didn't remove limbs from the dolls belonging to me and my sisters, but would draw mustaches on them with ball point pens. Guess being the youngest and the only boy in the family he was trying to bring some balance to the overwhelming gender disparity in our toys.