Making a Doll-Sized Dress Form

This post contains doll nudity, if that wasn't already incredibly obvious.

When I got my first resin BJD, I decided that one of the first things I wanted to make for her was a dress form. I sew a lot of my own clothes for my dolls, usually from patterns I made myself, and I knew that resin required more careful handling than, say, playline vinyl and plastic dolls. A dress form made to match her measurements would give me a way to draft and test the fit of patterns without the risk of staining her resin or damaging any body blushing I might do on her in the future. Also, I thought it would be fun.

Our model is Coco from Gem of Doll. She'll get a name of her own at... some point, but I haven't come up with one yet, so for now "Coco" will have to do. 

As a 1/4 scale or MSD sized doll, she stands at about 45 cm or slightly under 18 inches tall. The only other doll I've ever owned of comparable scale is my 16" Ellowyne Wilde, and looking at the measurements given online before Coco arrived, I was actually hoping that she could share some of the sewing and knitting patterns I already had for her. However, my Coco arrived with Gem of Doll's newer "Windsor" body rather than the Ver.II body that I can only assume the doll was originally shipped with, and ended up being quite a bit curvier than Ellowyne is, so that plan went out the window. They definitely never could have shared pants - Coco here has legs for days.

I started by wrapping Coco's body in saran wrap to protect it, then making a cast out of masking tape. I don't have any photos of this part of the process, but it's a very common technique for pattern making, and there are lots of tutorials available online. I've even done it on myself, albeit with duct tape, to make a doublet pattern for a Ren Faire costume.

After that, I marked the lines for the different pattern pieces on the masking tape in pen. I'd looked at a few blog posts online from people making their own full-sized custom dress forms to get a sense of where the best places to put the seams were. I cut the center back open very carefully to avoid scratching the resin, then pulled the cast off of her body and cut along the lines I had drawn.

To make the pattern pieces, I flattened out each masking tape piece on a piece of paper and traced around it, then added a 1'4" seam allowance. I also made sure to mark each pattern piece with exactly what it was, because I definitely would have forgotten what all of these little abstract shapes were supposed to be and gotten very confused and frustrated otherwise. 

I cut two of each piece out of some pale yellow cotton. 

I also cut two of each piece with the seam allowance removed out of mediumweight fusible interfacing, and applied it to the fabric. This helps to reinforce the fabric, and I want this thing to be sturdy. Woven cotton is generally not a stretch fabric, but it does have a certain amount of "give" to it regardless. It should also prevent the fabric from stretching out when I eventually stuff the dress form, so that it matches Coco's measurements and body shape as closely as possible. 

With everything (well, almost everything - we'll get to the rest as we go) cut out and interfaced, I could start to piece the various bits together. I kept the labeled pattern pieces close by, again to help remind me which pieces were which.

I also topstitched the seam allowances down on either side of each seam after pressing them open, as you can see on the finished bottom half:

It was nice to be able to use a sewing machine for most of this, since most of my doll sewing in the past has been for very slim Monster High dolls or for Myrtle, my Hujoo Nano Freya, who literally fits in the palm of my hand. My machine has a habit of eating tiny bits of fabric. I just don't trust it with seam allowances on that scale.

I did end up hand sewing the cups for the chest to the underbust, since my machine wasn't playing nice with the tight curves.

I do think this is partly because of the order I ended up doing things in. If I'd thought things through more I would have sewn the bottom of the cups to the underbust before I sewed the top of the cups to the upper part of the torso, rather than the other way around. 

Oh well. I still made it work. But surely that'll be the only hand sewing I have to do as part of this project, right? It should be smooth sailing from here.

Haha.

With the cups sewn in on both sides, I could close up the front center seam of the chest. Except... when I did, the shape didn't quite look right. I temporarily pinned the shoulder seams together and tried it on Coco to check how closely it fit her body, and sure enough, something was off in the chest area. I thought it looked like the "breasts" of the dress form were too close together in the center, so I took a seam ripper to the chest and took out the front underbust pieces.

I cut out two new underbust pieces that should allow for the center "v" shape to extend further up between the breasts and applied interfacing, the same as all the other pattern pieces. (Please excuse the shadows in some of these pictures - the ceiling light in this room is in a place where it's really difficult to avoid them from some angles.)

Now, I didn't want to take out the other torso pieces that seemed to be completely fine, so the least intrusive way to put these new parts in was... more hand sewing, of course. I wound up ladder stitching them to the side pieces:

Then I hand sewed the top edge to the bottom of the cup the same way I had before.

Once both sides were finished, I temporarily pinned the shoulder seams and center back seam together and slid the whole torso onto Coco like a top, being very careful to avoid scratching her resin. Still very carefully, I pinned and clipped the center front as close to her body as I could.

I was making wig caps at the same time as I was working on the dress form, so ignore the fact that she looks like she's being suffocated with a plastic bag. It's for her own protection, I promise. 

Anyway, I unpinned the back and shoulders and marked along the pinned/clipped line on the wrong side of the fabric, then stitched along it, turned it inside out, and tried it on her again.

And... It still wasn't right. If anything, the fit was even worse. I realized at this point that part of the problem was that the cup pieces themselves had turned out too wide. I suspect that this was caused way back when I was making the patterns in the first place: when I covered her body with saran wrap to protect it from the tape, I had a bit of trouble getting it to wrap closely around the doll, and there was some additional bulk where I had had to layer it in a couple of places. An unfortunate fact about working in miniature is that even just a couple of millimeters can make a really big difference, and it only becomes more noticeable the smaller in scale you get. 

I marked where I needed the sewing line on the cups to be, and then ripped it all out and did it all over again. Certainly not the most elegant solution, but I was kind of beyond elegant solutions by this point - I just wanted to get it done. I didn't take any pictures of this part, either, because it was basically exactly the same as what I just showed, but it's important to me that you know that I had to do all of this three goddamn times.

With that out of the way, I could finally move on. There were still a couple of pattern pieces I needed to make, namely the covers for the top, bottom, and arm holes. For the arm hole covers, which sounds kind of weird but I don't have anything better to call them, I folded over the seam allowances of the front and back side pattern pieces, pinned them together, and traced the shape that made onto a spare piece of paper from a pajama pants pattern I had been drafting earlier.

I added my 1/4" seam allowance and some notches to match up with the shoulder and side seams, as well as one to mark which side of the oval was meant to face the front.

Next was patterning the bottom cover. There are probably better ways to do this, but this is what I came up with. I pinned the bottom part of the dress form in place around Coco's waist and hips to get a sense of how far down her legs the dress form would extend, wrapped a pipe cleaner around that point, and clipped it in place.

I slid that down her legs and traced the shape onto paper, added a seam allowance, basically everything I'd done before. The pattern for the neck was also done very similarly, just being a rectangle the length of the circumference of her neck. I stopped taking pictures around this point because I figured you'd have the gist of it by now.

By now I had sewn the shoulder seams on the torso closed, and with the ordeal of making the front center seam work behind me, both the top and bottom pieces were basically done. All I had to do was sew them together at the waist:

Hey, we're getting somewhere! The vertical seams don't quite line up perfectly, which did bother me a little bit, but I truly could not bring myself to do all of that over again so it's fine. We're gonna have to live with it.

Next were the arm hole covers. These got hand sewn in, because they were another very small curved shape that my machine didn't deal with well. 

I wanted something to help reinforce them so they'd keep their shape better when the dress form was eventually stuffed. So I trimmed the seam allowances of the pattern pieces away and traced them onto some thin cardboard. (In this case, a strawberry Pocky box.)

I did have to trim the cardboard down a little more to get the pieces to fit, but once they were the right size I glued them to the inside of the dress form with a strong fabric glue. Specifically I'm using Fabri-Tac, which has always worked well for me. I tried to spread the glue thin enough that it wouldn't leak through the interfacing and fabric and show on the exterior, and was only partially successful. Oh well.

You can also get a good look at the inside of the dress form here. Other than clipping curves, I didn't really bother to trim the seam allowances down. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but I did also treat all of the raw edges with Fray Check to prevent them from, well... fraying, which is why I haven't bothered finishing them beyond that.

I set that aside to dry and went to work on the bottom of the dress form. I cut the fabric out for it and the neck piece and applied interfacing.

I folded the base in half a couple of times and measured along it to find the center, which I marked in pencil.

You can see how I did it wrong at first.

I was starting to think about the stand at this point. I wanted it to extend through the length of the dress form itself to lend it more stability, so there needed to be a hole in the base that I could feed it through. Which meant I needed to know how big around the stand was going to be so I could cut a hole the right size. Originally I was just going to use some barbecue skewers I already had lying around, but the scale was completely off and they would have been much too flimsy, so I made a trip to the craft store.

I swear Michaels used to sell these long wooden dowels that you could buy individually and cut down to the length you needed, but when I went they were nowhere to be found. Maybe they still do and my local store just sucks and doesn't stock them - it wouldn't be the first time that was the case. I ended up having to settle for a pre-cut package of, like, ten. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the rest of them.

Anyway. I placed the end of my dowel down where I'd marked the center of the fabric and traced around it. 

It took me a couple of tries to get it centered, and it still wasn't perfect, but I decided it was close enough.

I snipped out a kind of asterisk shape in the interior of the circle I'd drawn (and generously Fray Checked all the raw edges) so that when I slid the dowel through, it would push the fabric to the inside and create a clean edge. I don't think I explained that very well, but here, it works:

See those tiny little triangles around the opening? Probably not, if I'm being totally honest, but that's what I mean.

Next, I pinned the neck to the body, and promptly got distracted by the woodworking portion of this project.

Yeah, that's the last bit of sewing-adjacent material we're going to be seeing for a bit.

The dowels I got were only 12" long, which was not really long enough to suit the scale of the dress form without looking too short, at least in my view. That meant I was going to have to find a way to stick two of them together, end to end. The surface area of each end was small enough that I didn't really trust glue alone to do the job, so I came up with a more involved solution.

I got this little hand drill at a hobby shop a couple of years ago. I find that a lot of tools marketed for customizing tabletop and wargaming miniatures are also really useful in the doll hobby - I have a couple of tiny Army Painter detail brushes I use for faceups, too. 

I drilled a hole into the end of one of the dowels:

Then I trimmed the tapered end off of a toothpick and used wood glue to secure it inside the hole.

This was also the point where I caved and set a space heater up in the unfinished bedroom I've been using as a workspace, because the room wasn't fully insulated and it was fucking cold. It was probably a good thing for the project, too, because according to the bottle you're not supposed to use this stuff at temperatures of lower than 4ºC. 

I mean, it almost certainly wasn't actually colder than four degrees in there, but I don't know. I didn't bring in a thermometer to check.

Once the wood glue had dried and I no longer had to wear three layers of sweaters to sit at my craft table without shivering, I drilled another hole into the end of the other dowel and cut the free end of the toothpick down to fit.

I used more wood glue to cover the end of the toothpick and the ends of the dowels, then pushed the toothpick into the other hole until the dowels were snug together, wiped away the excess glue, and left it to dry.

Then I realized that there was more sewing I needed to do before I could keep working on the stand. So, back to that.

I finally actually sewed the neck piece down, after leaving it pinned for like a day and a half.

Then it was time to close up the back seam.

The center back was the one large seam that I didn't topstitch down. The size of the dress form would have made it impossible to do it on the machine, and I didn't really think it was necessary enough to bother hand sewing it. I feel like I'm making it sound like I hate hand sewing. I really don't. I actually generally enjoy it, I just didn't want to do more than I had to on this project.

Next was the cover for the neck. I got the diameter and then the radius of Coco's neck from the circumference, then used that measurement with a drawing compass to make a little circle. The rest was done the same as the other pattern pieces.

I pinned the cover into place, and - you guessed it - hand sewed it in, too. After being pressed, the right side looked like this:

Now I could measure out the length of the stand in relation to the size of the dress form. Well, "measure" is a generous word. What I actually did was stick my lengthened dowel into the shell of the dress form, let it hang from the neck cover, and mark about how much length I wanted to stick out from underneath. I completely eyeballed it. There was no actual measuring involved. 

The neck cover also got a bit of cardboard reinforcement. If anything it was even more important here, because it would give the stand something sturdier to stick to than just plain fabric when I ultimately glued it inside.

While the glue was drying I broke out my cutting mat and hacksaw to cut off the end of the stand where I'd marked.

Doing this at my desk without bothering to clamp the wood down probably did not adhere to best safety practices. I have enough experience using hand saws like this that I was confident I wouldn't hurt myself, and I was working in a space where even if I did screw up I was the only one who would get hurt. Please be careful and keep your fingers away from sharp blades, especially if you're not comfortable with the tools you're using or if you're working in close proximity to others. I don't want to be a buzzkill, but this stuff really is important.

With the safety PSA out of the way... sanding the sawed-off end smooth was much less hazardous.

Once the glue for the neck cover had dried, the dress form itself was almost finished. The only actual sewing I had left to do was to add the bottom cover to the rest of the shell. I pinned it in place, leaving a gap in the back so that I'd be able to turn it right side out.

Then instead of actually sewing it down I went back to working on the stand, obviously.

You may be beginning to understand why my workspaces are always so messy.

The stand needed a base to keep it upright. I had these short blocks of balsa wood, and at first I figured I could drill a hole in the middle of one of them and just glue the dowel inside. It would certainly have been functional.

I thought I could come up with something a little more stylish, though, and if it didn't work out I could always go back to plan A. I also had some sheets of craft wood (I think it's basswood, but I'm not certain) left over from another doll furniture project I did a couple of years ago, and I thought I had enough to make some legs for the stand. I freehanded a template with the dowel close by for reference.

 Then I cut it out and traced it four times onto the wood.

Then I was faced with the dilemma of how I was going to actually cut these things out. Cutting curved pieces like this is basically exactly what scroll saws or jigsaws are meant for, but I don't have easy access to tools like that. I didn't have a very elegant solution for this one, either.

I ended up using a utility knife to carve roughly around the lines I'd traced, leaving a few millimeters of extra space. 

I'm telling you what I did here, but this is another technique that I don't know that I can really recommend. I had to use a lot of force to get the knife to cut all the way through the wood, enough that my hands were getting sore by the time I was done, and while I didn't injure myself working on this project, I absolutely have sliced my hands open while being careless with craft knives before. There are definitely easier, more efficient, and safer ways to do this.

Another downside to this technique:

Craft wood like this can split really easily along the grain, especially if it's being handled roughly. I had to glue this piece back together in two places. Thankfully, after that it held together just fine.

After I had the pieces cut out, I went back in with a more precise craft knife to cut the edges down until I reached the lines. I was basically just whittling at this point.

Then I sanded the edges down with sandpaper in three different grits. Which may have been overkill for something like this, but it did get them really smooth.

To attach the legs to the dowel, I planned to use basically the same method I had used to attach the two dowels together. First I used the smallest bit I had for my hand drill to drill some test holes in the edge of some scrap wood and the spare length of dowel, to make sure the wood wouldn't split.

All was well, so I moved forward with the plan. I split the legs into two pairs, with the intention that the two legs in each pair would end up on opposite sides of the dowel. I measured - actually measured, this time - and marked where to drill. One pair of legs was marked 0.5cm from the top edge and 1cm from the bottom, while the other set was marked 1cm from the top edge and 0.5cm from the bottom.

I staggered them like that so that when I drilled through the dowel, the perpendicular channels wouldn't intersect, and I'd be able to feed a pin through to secure the pieces together. The dowel itself I divided into quarters and made marks to match the ones on the legs, with the matching marks on opposite sides of the dowel. Then I drilled into the legs and the dowel where I'd marked them.

You can see that I'm still not managing to get things centered perfectly.

While I was doing all of this, I was also working on another part I was planning to add to the base of the stand in hopes of giving it some extra stability. I even got the power drill out for it. But it didn't quite work out how I hoped and then when I got to actually putting everything together I decided not to use it after all, and this post is long enough already, so I'm not going to go over it in any more depth than this.

For my "pins," I'm using this wire that matches the width of my smallest drill bit pretty much exactly. I have no idea what gauge it is, don't ask me. Those little quarter-circles are the pieces I didn't end up using, by the way.

I snipped off a couple of lengths of wire, coated one end of each in wood glue, and stuck them into the holes of one of the legs.

Then I applied glue to the edge of the leg, fed the wires through the matching holes on one side of the dowel, and pushed the pieces together until they sat flush against each other.

I trimmed the ends of the wire down to fit, applied glue to the wires and edge of the matching leg, and pushed it on as well.

The other two legs were assembled the exact same way. Here's how the base looked when it was all put together:

With that, all of the construction on the stand should be done!

Well. Uh.

So. 

Unfortunately, I was a little too rough handling the top of the stand shortly after this, and the toothpick that had been holding it together... snapped in half.

Oops.

So I had to fix that. I didn't take any pictures of this, either, because I did it the same way I've done all of the joinery in this project - the only difference from the first time I put it together is that when I repaired it I used the smaller drill bit and the same wire I used to put the base together. But after that construction on the stand was all done.

I was originally planning to just paint the stand black, but I asked some friends of mine what they thought and a few of them suggested going with a dark brown instead. I really liked how that turned out, so if you're reading this: thank you, friends!

The stand was painted with acrylic craft paint, then given a couple of coats of matte varnish to seal it. I find that the matte varnish I use often dries with a semi-gloss finish if you're not careful, but in this case that was kind of what I wanted anyway.

God that thing is impossible to get into frame.

Well, with the stand all put together and painted, that meant the only thing left to do was actually finish the dress form itself.

I sewed the bottom on, and I even used the machine this time! It did turn out a little janky, but I was willing to live with it. Honestly, I was kind of just ready for this to be done by this point. I cut another cardboard piece out as well, this one with a hole for the stand.

You can see in the photo that I notched the seam allowance so it would lay flatter. I glued the cardboard in the same way I had before, making sure to leave the seam allowance at the back free so that I wouldn't have trouble stitching the opening shut later.

I felt very clever gluing it in before I turned the dress form inside out. It was a lot easier than trying to stick it inside and get everything in the right place without getting glue all over the place through the little opening I'd left in the back. I felt very clever right up until I did have to turn the thing inside out.

Yeah, it wasn't happening. There was no way. The opening I'd left was just too small for the cardboard to fit through. I had to rip it all out.

Instead I cut the cardboard piece down to a small ring that would sit around the opening for the stand, since that was the spot I though would need the most reinforcement, and glued it back in place like that.

Then I could actually turn it right side out, and I had one dress form stand and one very sad-looking deflated dress form.

So it was time to move onto stuffing the sucker. I used a combination of leftover fluff from combing out yarn for another doll's hair and store-bought polyfill. I also realized that the additional height the legs gave the stand meant that it was now actually too tall, so I whacked about an inch or so off of the top behind the scenes.

To make stuffing the neck a little easier, and because I was still a little worried about the join between the dowels breaking again, I wrapped some cotton batting around the neck end until it was roughly as wide as the neck should be, and glued it in place.

You'll notice that the stand has been fed through the hole in the bottom of the dress form. The first time I tried to do this, I did it before sticking the end of the stand through, and then had to rip it all off in a panic when I realized that if I did that it wasn't going to fit. Luckily, the glue hadn't had a chance to fully dry yet.

Once it was as thick as I wanted it, I applied some more wood glue to the top of the dowel and very carefully maneuvered it through the length of the dress form to press against the neck cover at the top.

Then I just spent a couple of hours stuffing it. I didn't want it to be squishy, so I stuffed it pretty firmly, not like a stuffed animal. After that, all that was left to do was... more hand sewing, of course. I ladder stitched the opening at the bottom shut.

And that was it. I was done! Here's a turnaround of the finished product:

So, how does the dress form measure up to the original?

Well... she's certainly not the perfect body double I had hoped for. Her proportions are a little off, her posture is a little funky, and her seams don't quite line up right, but her measurements actually do match Coco's fairly well. And despite the setbacks and all of my complaining, I did have fun working on this project, and I'm ultimately happy with the final result.

This project took me about two weeks to finish, which makes a lot of sense when I look back on it, but for some reason I expected to be done much sooner. It didn't seem like it should be a "big project" when I was working on it, but it definitely was. I think I'm gonna have to split projects like this one into multiple posts in the future, because this one ended up being way longer than I expected.

Speaking of which: if you made it all the way down here, thanks for sticking it out to the end with me! I hope you found some of what I talked about here helpful or entertaining, and I hope you'll be back to see what I post next. 

Maybe next time we'll get Coco some actual clothes. Or hair. Or a face. Or a name...