Thrifty Thursdays: Homemade Barbie Doll Dresses

I am not that fond of Barbie dolls. In fact, I even considered not allowing our girls to have them. But my husband and I gave the girls a “Barbie” doll house for Christmas a year ago. (Smart move, right! Well, my oldest daughter was going to garage sales with me, saw it and liked it, and I thought it would be a fun and cheap present for all of the girls.)

I do not know if it is a real Barbie house, but it is a house that is the perfect size for Barbie dolls or princess dolls that are the size of Barbie dolls. So of course, my girls wanted Barbie dolls to play with in the house. The girls already had a couple of dolls, but I told them I would look for more when I went to garage sales. I did get a few that next summer, but most did not have appropriate (if any) clothing.

So we needed new clothes–and here Kaylin will take over the story of our homemade Barbie clothes.

My sisters and I like to play with Barbies, but we don’t have many clothes for them. The clothes in the stores were expensive and immodest. One day, I was flipping through a magazine (Family Fun), and I saw how to make Barbie clothes out of socks. My mom got one of my younger sister’s socks that already had a hole. She cut off the foot part of the sock, and then cut a tiny hole in the middle for the head and two more on the sides for arms. The sock was small, so she added a piece of pretty material on the bottom. It fit perfectly! We did that to other old socks, and we had plenty of clothes for our Barbie dolls.

Here are a little more details:  The original picture that we saw were from big socks, like an adult male white sport sock. The article said that her daughters then used fabric markers to decorate the “dress.” We did this, which you can see in the picture on the top of the page; and I also took red socks from my two year old, and added material to them to make it long enough for the Barbie dolls. I will attempt to show you how I did this.

First, I cut off the foot of the sock.

On the top part of the sock, I sewed in from each corner, leaving a hole in the middle. Then I sewed a diagonal line up so the shoulders would be more rounded. You could just do this step if you wanted to (not sew the straight line in from each corner.) You want to leave about a 1″ hole in the middle for the head to go through.

I cut off the excess material on the corners so that it would not be so bunchy.

Turn the sock right side out so that the seams are in the inside and try it on the doll so that you can see where to cut the arm holes. I just made a VERY little hole for the arms.

Dress is done, but since it was a small sock, it was too short.

If you used a white adult sock, the dress would be done!

Barbie doll using the top of one of my husband’s white sport socks.

This is how I added material to the bottom of the sock:

This is the hardest part to describe. I turned the sock inside out. I put the material for the skirt up inside the sock this way: I put the skirt material ‘s right side facing the right side of the sock (as the sock is inside out.) The bottom of the skirt material is towards the neck of the sock, and the gathered edge of the skirt material should be lined up with the bottom of the sock as you will sew those two edges together. Sew very slowly and carefully the edges together, making sure to not sew the sock and skirt that are under the part that you are sewing. I had to sew about 1/2″, put down my needle, and then shift the material a little so I could sew a little bit more. When you’ve sewn all the way around, turn it right side out.

All the dresses that we made before they were decorated.

If a white sock is used, children can use fabric markers to design their own Barbie dresses. I had some leftover markers from when we decorated T-shirts for a birthday party, so the girls had fun drawing patterns and designs on their sock.

So now we have some modest clothes for the Barbie dolls that cost us almost nothing! All the socks we used also had holes in them so normally we would have just thrown them away!