19th Century Doll Clothes Links

I confess I never quite outgrew my girlish fascination with doll clothes, doll houses, and miniatures. I quit making doll clothes because I needed clothes more than dollies did, and there were so many other things to do. However, browsing the Internet shows me that there are a lot of grown-up ladies (and gentlemen) who never put aside their interest in miniatures, scale models, dolls, and doll clothes.

Although I feel I could easily be sucked into the world of dressing vintage dolls or even creating fanciful cloth dolls, I'm going to confine myself to making clothes for this one doll. To that end, I've put together a collection of links that I found helpful, informative, or just interesting.

• Doll Clothes Patterns from the Butterick Publishing Company, 1901. I was surprised to find that "The Delineator" marketed tissue paper patterns for doll clothes. This page shows the pattern envelope drawings in enough detail to copy fairly easily.
• Child with china doll: 19th century photographs of children and their antique dolls.
• "Dolls' outfits are a feature in the toy shops this season."...from Harper's Bazaar, 1872. These drawings of doll costumes are small and not detailed, but it's interesting to see the variety of characters dolls were meant to represent.
• THROUGH THE EYES OF A DOLL From The Youth's Companion, 1842. This is a rather gruesome little tale, informing the magazine's young readers that their mommies and daddies would be sad if their children died, but that excessive grief is idolatrous, and they'll probably have replacement kids anyway. Presumably, the kids knew that already, but jeez, who wants hear that from a doll?
• Restoration and dressing of a china doll. Nancy Wilson Barbata, aka The Doll Fancier, photographed the steps she went through to restore and dress a nineteenth century china head doll.
• Those Old Dolls Are Much Fussier Than Humans by Joan Kiplinger. This is a detailed and helpful guide to designing and sewing period-appropriate garments for old dolls.
• The Doll Costumer's Guild The Doll Costumer's Guild publishes 4 journals a year with information, patterns and sewing techniques for authentic costuming of antique dolls made from 1840 through the turn of the century. I'm not sure if this Web site is still active, but the illustrations are quite informative.
• Freebie Friday - Drafting Doll Clothes. Links to several interesting approaches to making doll dress patterns
• Past Patterns makes historical patterns for real people, not dolls, but I find their pattern envelope illustrations very helpful in understanding how old-time clothes were constructed.