Thank you!

To everyone who made our SILK SALE such a wonderful success — thank you! We hope that you are enjoying your purchases and planning beautiful sewing projects.

Here is our next pattern release — #1964: Darling Doris! 1960s Ladies' Suit for 18 Inch Dolls — made up using the bronze taffeta dot from our Autumn Lights Kit, and a coordinating soft cotton print from our stash.

We are SO ALMOST READY to release this charming, elegant pattern. Look for Darling Doris! to arrive in our Etsy shop next week.

And don't you love our girl's 1960s jewelry accessories? Along with gloves and a darling hat, these will be part of the NEXT pattern on our release schedule, #2064: Posh Accessories for 18 Inch Dolls — because every mid-century gal needs a double-strand of pearls and a pair of matching cluster earrings!

We are so happy with the way these earrings turned out — and with how easy they are to make and wear. Our pattern directions will walk you through the super-simple beaded construction, and the finished earring slides right onto the post of an American Girl® brand stud earring.

Here's a tip: if you are interested in giving this look a try when the Posh Accessories pattern comes out, the American Girl® Silver Earrings for Dolls set that includes the star studs we used above is currently on CLEARANCE SALE for only $5.00.

But don't worry if you miss the sale. American Girl has recently released similar earrings in gold that will likely be available for quite a while.

To prepare for the sale, and for making our jacket, we took Linda Lee's Sewing with Silk class on Craftsy. We would highly recommend this class to anyone else interested in sharpening their technique before cutting into their fabric.

We did include several insights that we learned in this class — and from our own experience — in our sales posts on Etsy. But as most of those kits are now SOLD OUT and the listings unavailable, here are the tips again:

NOTES ON SEWING WITH SILK and SILK VELVET

• Firmly woven decorator silks like these can be (almost) as easy to work with as cotton — and even silk velvet can be tamed with a little care, and a lot of basting.

• To avoid snags, always use sharp, slender silk pins and a fresh 70-80 weight universal needle in your sewing machine. For soft seams that meld almost invisibly into your fabric, try sewing with natural fiber threads — 100% cotton, or even silk.

• For the velvet, pins will not be enough! Consider a temporary basting spray (though be sure to test it on a scrap of fabric first) and always hand baste your seams before finishing them on a sewing machine.

• Whenever possible, machine stitch velvet in the direction of the pile (the direction the fibers lie down smoothly). If you find the fabric wiggles around, consider using a walking foot, roller foot or teflon foot. You can also lower the presser foot tension, holding the fabric taut between your hands as you sew.

• Before pressing, make sure your iron is set for the proper fiber content — and test the setting on a scrap of your fabric. Be sure to pre-heat your iron well so it won't spit or leak when you start to use it.

• Steam can be your friend with silk — and particularly with the silk velvet. If you do need to press seams on the silk velvet, work gently, in the direction of the nap, and always on a towel or velvet-pressing fabric or pin board.

We'd like to talk about one more technique from the Craftsy class that we used extensively in making the 1960s ensemble we featured above — INTERFACING!!!

Interfacing is not something we typically reach for with doll clothes, where one is usually trying to remove bulk, not add it.

But interfacing doesn't just make a fabric stiffer or heavier. It can also be used to change the texture, hang or drape of a fabric. As any theatrical costumer will tell you, interfacing is essential to turn lightweight, decorative fabrics — like the bronze silk taffeta — into sturdier garment or outerwear fabrics. It can even be used to SOFTEN the contours of a finished garment, as we'll discuss below.

Linda Lee, the instructor in the Craftsy course, recommends testing swatches of various interfacings before ironing or basting one in place. We second that recommendation — and here are the tests we ran before making our silk taffeta jacket.

On the left is a featherweight, non-woven fusible Pellon and on the right is a lightweight woven fusible.

Note that we did not just test the interfacing on the fabric. We also slashed the interfaced fabric and tested a seam. Seams in doll clothes add so much more stiffness proportionally than seams in human-size clothes, so it is worthwhile to test their effect on a fabric you are considering.

By the way, we chose the non-woven fusible interfacing to give our finished jacket a crisp — but not too crisp — hang.

The shell blouse in the ensemble needed no interfacing, but the skirt — made out of the same lightweight quilting cotton — did.

Though quilting cottons are easy to work with, they tend to reveal the lines of the body underneath. We wanted our girl's 1960s pencil skirt to have a softer hang, hugging the curves while still floating smoothly away from doll's fabric-and-plastic hip joints.

Though we tested woven and non-woven interfacings, we knew the best choice for a smooth, SOFT garment would be a tricot (knitted) fusible interfacing. Of course, we were out of tricot interfacing — and it was too late to run to JoAnn for more!

We did, however, have an entire bolt of this gauzy, lightweight cotton knit in our stash, as well as plenty of double-sided fusible webbing (which is made of just the iron-on glue, without any fabric at all).

So we did what theatrical costumers often do — we improvised our own interfacing sandwich with the webbing in between the two fabrics.

In the picture below, it's the sample on the left — and it gave us exactly the soft, smooth drape we wanted.

Though you might not have a bolt of such material lying around your workroom, inexpensive layering tops for women and girls are often made of gauzy knits like this one. When searching for up-cyclable fabrics at Goodwill, it can be useful to keep an eye out for interfacing, lining and interlining materials as well.

Finally, though most of our kits sold out on the first day of the sale, we do have a VERY FEW Flowers In the Trianon Kits left — and ONE Holiday Revels Kit that got misplaced and was not included with the original sale run. If you're interested in either, click on the links in this paragraph, or on the photos below!

See you next time!