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A few posts ago, I posted an update to my original tutorial on making leather doll fashion . I assumed some of you might not have access to stores selling leather or even its vinyl or pleather look-alikes, which is why I included a few online resources. And while that provided a solution, the truth is, it is still difficult to find more than three colors: black, brown and...if you are lucky...tan. While preparing the report for our Milan Fashion Week report I needed a specific color of leather that was not immediately within my reach. That’s when I decided to try out a craft technique I found for  for DIY (Do It Yourself) faux leather...otherwise known as “Vegan Leather.” The technique for creating it involves painting layers of acrylic paint on fabric. On some sites, there were comments questioning the interest in making such a thing especially given the cheap price of vinyl. And yes, if you have access to glove weight leather or vinyl, or if you are selling your creations, this p...

As I mentioned in my last post, textiles are the most important element in creating haute couture. When I am looking over the catwalks or the red carpets, with certain styles, I am limited by my access (or lack) of luxury fabrics. I can sometimes get around that limitation with opulent trimming. But even then.....the best is in the fabric shops of Paris..and I am not always in that beloved city when I need them. Left: dress made using a fancy trim. Right: dress made with my own surface treatment. For the Fall/Winter ready-to-wear Ermanno Scervino dress I replicated for my doll, I used a very elaborate frilly trim and a super simple pattern: fitted bodice with an attached full skirt. It took, literally no time to do this. Quite naturally, there were details I missed from the original dress, but at the end of the day, the doll was happy because.....all she really wanted was the look! That said, after fashion month, I took a closer look at the Scervino dresses and I decided to make it aga...

Fashion weeks are underway and while I await my girls' report on New York fashion, I thought I would revisit a dress from last season and use it to illustrate the principle of reinterpreting a design. To the layman,  making a 1/6 of a designer's dress constitutes "copying." But as I've stated before....no matter how much you know about sewing and pattern making for humans, the tiny proportions of the doll forces you to simplify, stylize and reinterpret. By the time you've worked all of that into the design, the garment becomes your own. Sometimes I can get pretty close to the original but when it comes to embellishment.....that calls for my own interpretation. Also, there might be times when you see something you like, but think it might be cool if other materials were substituted. For those of you who are keeping a croquis book (sketch pad), this is why it is also important to note down garment details. Last season (Fall/Winter 2016) I saw a Valentino gown I ...

A few of the girls are in France for the Cannes Film Festival and somehow I got roped into making a few dresses for them! (Yes, they have more than enough clothes already but you know how it is....they say they can't be seen in the same dress twice!) Nonetheless the seeds of this project were originally planted in my mind upon the sight of a black Versace gown Jennifer Garner wore at the last Oscars Award Ceremony. Jennifer Garner in Versace (center). My rendition using beads (left). The same dress but with black glitter (right). Glitter works better in this case! The dress had beads over one breast and in my attempt to recreate the look, I added beads to mine. But the scale was off. The beads were simply not small enough. This haunted me which prompted more research as to how I could more faithfully reproduce the look. In the three and a half years I've been making these tiny clothes, what I've learned is that scale is important, but achieving a look often times inv...