Oh, yeah, Barbies! I'm a big fan of Barbie dolls. I probably started sewing and creating because of their beautiful, pink, plastic, shiny, wonderful world. I used to look for everything connected with Barbie world when I was a child because everything was just so attractive. But it was also slightly unreachable. Slovenia was a small post-communist and socialist country in my childhood, a part of Yugoslavia (YU consisted of 6 smaller republics (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro) and 2 (less-independent) states: Kosovo and Vojvodina).
Everything nice was coming from Germany, Austria, Italy, also Czech Republic and Slovakia and Hungary. Everything what was precious and valuable was in German marks and it was quite expensive. So we used one currency to buy and sell in our country and German currency to save money in and to buy more expensive goods like cars, kitchen appliences and Barbies, yes, Barbies. My mum bought some for me when she was able to travel abroad as part of excursions for teachers. They were probably from China but at that time even those toys were of relatively good value. I didn't have any original Barbies - in my memory they were so expensive, like 99 marks = 99 euros.
I remember looking through a catalogue of toys which was in German. I could never get those pink houses, cars, closest, scooters, beautiful sparkly clothes etc. So I created my own from boxes, fabric and so on. Things were not pink but I was able to play and to create. I took good care of any Barbie clothes that I owned and copied them to re-creat my own clothes for Barbies. (I should show them once before my children totally destroy everything.)
Anyway, enough of memories and nostalgia. I'm getting old.
Here are 3 Barbie dresses and two patterns I've made recently (The first one and the third one are made after the same pattern, the second one is a different pattern.) Here I'll show just pictures and I'll try and make PDF files to download for my next post.
#1: The Blue Sparkly dress
#2: The Pink Cotton dress
The process of making:
Here is the original file I found on the internet, but it's a .jpg file, so not very useful: Simplicity 4719
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zNJn0I7Mn7pZc4Z1mNKTYUHMLuao-khv?usp=sharing
#3: The Pink Boucle and Satin dress - the latest one
(This Barbie is like my best one that I own and she is over 30 years old.)
Useful site for making Barbie clothes:
