Thursday — March 31, 2017

Introducing the Lee & Pearl® Fitting Room: Meet the Models

Today, we're announcing a new, recurring feature — the Fitting Room!

Here at Lee & Pearl™, we take our design process seriously, testing and tweaking our patterns until we are satisfied that every line, every detail and every proportion works, making a garment that looks exactly like the real thing and fits perfectly on the doll for which it is intended.

Up until now, our patterns have been designed to fit Mattel-era American Girl® dolls. But the world of 18 inch dolls is changing. As the American Girl® company experiments with new body designs and new proportions — as well as a seeming relaxation of quality control — the size of the dolls may become less reliable. At the same time, many of our customers and friends are looking to other doll lines to pick up the quality vs. affordability slack. And there are plenty of those other lines, with more popping up all the time. (We'll be talking about a few of those new lines in the next installment of our Toy Fair report, by the way.)

This isn't necessarily bad news for the kids or collectors who love dolls — more dolls is good, right? But these are definitely interesting times for patternmakers, especially those of us who like to create tailored options beyond the mass-market, one-size-fits-all poufy skirts, tent-shaped tops and elastic waistbands.

In our new Fitting Room feature, we are going to try to address this problem. We'll start by testing our current pattern garments on a range of available dolls — the dolls in our chart above, and any others we acquire in the future. Though some garments will fit some dolls without alterations, that won't be true for all the garments and all the dolls. And we can't promise to recommend easy fixes. Pants in particular are going to be difficult, as we know from our own, human size fitting rooms. But we will do the best we can. And if any of you have suggestions or solutions that have worked for you and your dolls, we'd love to hear them.

Stay tuned for more in this series...

See you next Thursday!

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