Vintage doll patterns

Someone over on Dollieh Sanctuary posted a link to another person's Google+ photo page that has scans of doll clothing sewing patterns. (scans of doll clothing patterns) The big blank space is where the link is. I never have figured out how to make links visible with my snazzy black background. go to dolliehsanctuary, toolshed, total sewing, for the thread "where to find sewing patterns" and look for a post from May 31st 2014 - probably about page 5. That's the link.

I looked at the link initally in my Android devices's browser and saw many interesting patterns. So I went to my desktop (PC) computer to see if I could find a way to download the images from the more interesting ones.

Imagine my dismay when I 1) could not figure out how to send myself a useable link to a specific image folder, and 2) could not find the most interesting patterns on my desktop's browser!

I never did solve the link problem, but I eventually diagnosed and found a workaround to the missing folder problem. The PC browser shows "highlights" rather than every folder and I got an error message when trying to load all the folders.

I found as many image folders as I could on the PC, used the download button (which sometimes did not work - taking me instead to some kind of non-functional video link? WTF??).

For the folders I could only 'see' on the mobile device, and for folders on the PC where the download button was broken, I clicked through each image (if you do this on the thumbnail page you get tiny useless thumbnails - ask me how I know), downloading each image.

I plugged my tablet into my PC after getting the images for one pattern set, invoked it as a drive on my PC, navigated to the download folder, sorted by 'modified', and cut and pasted the images into a folder on my PC.

Whew. This took most of a day - interspersed by getting the dog washed to get rid of some of the seasonal allergy itchiness and some general errand-running.

Some of the patterns I saved are for the Glamor Girl doll, some for Miss Revlon, some for Barbie, some for Chrissy and so on and so forth.

I decided to try out a skating dress pattern for a Glamor Girl doll first.

I blew it up on the photocopier until it was close to the right scale for an Iplehouse EID (I don't have very many things left in my Etsy store for this size doll) and started making trial versions of it.
Three versions later (the Glamor Girl doll is much less curvy than the EID - I imagine the patterns might work well for the American Girl doll) I'm getting close enough that I'll cut the next attempt out of plain white lining - planning to use it in a store-worthy garment.

I'm excited to work with these patterns, even though it may be more time efficient to draft my own. My justification for this comes from my experience using (human-scale) vintage patterns for myself. There are subtle differences in fit between a vintage collared blouse and a modern collared blouse pattern. I'm not sure that the differences will be significant in doll-scale, but that's why it is a justification.

Next I think I'll try blowing up some Barbie-scale lingerie.