Comparing Dolls for the Perfect Fit

Did you know that it's been FOUR years since we first launched our doll patterns at CKC?  And as of today, we have nearly 200 doll patterns available!  Wow! We thought it would be fun to do a special blog post to celebrate so we are going to share some of our favorite dolls with you, as well as make a comparison of all the different kinds and sizes of dolls that can wear our patterns.  

(Assortment of dolls dressed in Noel's, Ruby's/Izzy's, Peony's, Saige's/Carrie's, and Poppy's.)

Although we design our outfits to be for 14", 15", and 18" dolls, that does not mean that they only work on the standard dolls that we often pose for our listings. In fact, not all brand name dolls are even the same size from one year to the next.  Our doll outfits are extremely versatile and will look fabulous on everything from generic discount dolls up to the fanciest of collector dolls. And actually, we don't even need to limit their use to dolls.  My daughter has a tendency to share her outfits with every stuffed animal she can get her hands on! 

We put together a chart of our favorite dolls that we regularly dress up in CKC outfits. This is not a full list - it's just to give you an idea of the range in measurements that will work:

There are many differences in our dollies who we love so much!  I think it's really interesting to see how a certain brand's doll can change from year to year.  Did you notice?

Plus we're super excited about the three new major dolls that were added recently!

Grand Tour of Our New Website

We are so excited to have our brand new website up and running!  Have you come to see it yet? If not, you can find it at www.createkidscouture.com.  Today we are going on a special VIP tour together so we can get ourselves familiar with all the ins and outs of our website. We have a lot of new features we know you're going to love!

Here it is! We have all of our main links right on the home page where they are easily accessible. Let's look more closely at some of them:

Here are the links we can find in the top right corner of the homepage. We have all the standard links you would normally find: Home, Contact, About, FAQ, My Account, and View Cart. I encourage you to read the FAQ page, especially if you are a new customer! 

In that corner we also have the links for all of our social media. Did you know you can follow CKC on all of these?  They can be especially fun if you like sneak peeks and interacting with our staff and other fans.  

Next, you may have noticed that cute little present all wrapped up in a pink bow. (Let's be honest, it's always the first thing I notice on a page.)  Yes, CKC now has a Gift Registry!  You can click that link to create a registry for yourself and a specific event. You will enter a password that your guests will need to use to protect your privacy. Load up your registry with all the patterns you've been dying to have! (Hint: Valentine's Day is coming up and it's really easy to email your significant other a link and a password. Who needs flowers anyway?) 

Next we will look at the colored buttons under the main photo. These links are some of our favorites! First up we have our Boutique Directory in red. If you are a fan of CKC styles but don't actually sew them yourself, this directory tells you where to find boutiques that sell CKC outfits! Be sure to check out our shops - they have really gorgeous creations and many of the boutiques even do custom orders.  (We still have a few spots left in our directory so if you own a boutique and are interested in being listed, please email courtney@createkidscouture.com.) 

The blue button takes us to tiered pricing. Are you familiar with our tiered pricing? Be sure to click the blue link and check it out! It really is a fantastic deal - it's like a sale that you can shop any time you're ready! And speaking of sales, the green button will take you straight to any items that we have on sale at the moment, whether it is the Half-Off Friday pattern, a new release sale, or a special occasion sale. You will always find them under that link.  Finally the pink link is our Guest Book but that's not quite in operation yet.  We will let you know when it is. 

Now let's take a look at the far left margin of our home page. You can see that we have the standard "View Cart" link, as well as a button with Wholesale Info. If you don't know what that is, you can read about it by clicking the link. 

Next we have a complete list of all our pattern categories. We currently have Girls, Tweens, Womens, Women's Plus, Doll Clothes, and Boys. Clicking each link will take us to the page where those patterns are listed. We have so many girl patterns available that they are also broken down into subcategories as well: 

This is what the Girls category looks like. Each of the listings are available with a picture and a price, which is perfect for browsing. If you look at the right side of the screen above, you will see that there's also a drop down box to sort products by price, alphabetical order, and newest patterns. And -- I love this -- we now have a "View All" feature!  Browsing CKC patterns is one of my favorite things to do and it just got easier to see them all at once! 

When we click on one of the pattern links it will bring us to a listing like this one. First we see the main cover photo and then four additional views of outfits that were made using this pattern. AND -- we have now added a "View Gallery" button for each listing! 

Here you can see that we clicked the turquoise "View Gallery" button under the main picture and it opened the popup window to the left. Now we can see even more tester photos with the different pattern options and fabric combinations. I really love this new feature! 

Below the listing photo we have a lot more useful information too. There are links that allow us to email the listing to a friend or to leave our reviews of the pattern. This review feature is new to our website and we would love to hear what you like about our patterns!  You must be a verified buyer in order to leave a review. 

Next on the listing is the price of the pattern and we can see that this one is on sale a little longer today, woohoo!  Here is where we can add the item to our cart and purchase when we are ready. 

This next info is VERY important!  On the new website our purchased download links will only be available for 7 days!  You MUST download your patterns within a week or you will lose them. We will no longer be able to resend patterns if you forgot to download them. We highly recommend saving your patterns to Dropbox right when you receive them! It can be done even from a smartphone. We know that you worked hard to pay for your patterns and we want you to be able to enjoy them! 

If we are not yet ready to purchase the pattern we are looking at, we can save it to our gift registry or add it to our wishlist for ourselves. Many of our fans find it helpful to create a wishlist so they know exactly what they want when we have a sale or when they want to reach the next level of tiered pricing. To access our wishlists later, we can find them under My Account at the top of any page. 

On the listing page we also have a description of the pattern that tells what makes each one unique, its different options, difficulty level, and of course the fabric requirements. We also added our quick link to the free Marilyn's pattern, so if you're ever in a hurry to find it you can get it right on any of our listings! 

Now let's go back to our home page and finish looking at the left column of links. The next one we haven't discussed yet is Couture Clearance. What is this, you may ask? 

It is our fabulous section of clearance-priced patterns!  You won't believe the prices of these favorites!  We currently have 22 patterns listed on clearance from $2 to $5! What a great way to add to your collection of patterns! 

The next link is for the Pattern of the Month Club, and we only have three more days to join for 2014!  Friday is the last day to become a member and receive a brand new pattern every month. 

The last link on the left column takes us to our Free Patterns and Tutorials page: 

Did you know that we have the links for all of our FREE tutorials in one convenient place?  And now we can get that link right from our website! Come see what a wide variety of free patterns we have: clothes, accessories, home decor, projects for kids, sewing techniques, boutique tutorials, and of course our tips and tricks blog posts. What a wonderful resource! And we will continue adding to this page every week as we create new freebies on Tuesdays. 

We're almost done -- are you still with us?  Next up, we have a neat new Search Site box. I love that as I type in what I want to find, it lists suggestions as I type, complete with pictures. Let's say that I can't remember the name of Coco's Fabric Pettiskirt but I want to find the listing. I begin typing in "tutu".  You can see that right above the search box it brings up the different versions of Coco's along with a picture of each. So cool! Finding the right pattern that we're looking for just got a lot easier.

This brings us to the bottom of our home page. Here we can find links for the size charts, terms and conditions, and info for becoming an affiliate. We want to emphasize how important it is to look at these size charts regularly and re-measure your child often!  They grow so fast and if we are going to make custom outfits for our kids we definitely want them to have the right fit! 

Now very last on the website you will see our final parting message: "Thanks for Shopping with Us."  At CKC we truly appreciate you, our fans, and we hope you love sewing with our patterns as much as we do.  Please contact us if you need any help with our website and its new features. 

Let's Create! ~ Kristen 

Free Tutorial Tuesday: Ruffled Chair Envelope

Ah, love is in the air! Valentine's Day is coming up and for many of us that means helping our kids make valentines for family and friends. Soon our homes will be filled with pink and red scraps and glitter glue everywhere. I love seeing my kids get creative even when it's messy. Whatever your style of valentines, we have the perfect place for you to put them! 

Isn't this adorable?  Our Ruffled Chair Envelope ties right onto your chair where it's easy to see. The super cute rickrack flap lifts up to put valentine treasures inside. (I see lots of room for candy!) The decorative ruffles are optional and we know either way will look fantastic!  Our step-by-step tutorial will make it really easy for you to make your own chair envelope. 

To download our free PDF pattern for the Ruffled Chair Envelope, click here. 

We know you'll LOVE it! 

Let's Create! ~ Kristen 

American Girl Shopping Spree giveaway

 

Around this time one year ago, Create Kids Couture released our first doll pattern! Since then we've loved watching our doll pattern collection grow. We wanted to do something fun to celebrate this anniversary, so we asked some AMAZING sponsors to help us. They so kindly agreed to help fund our newest giveaway!!! Because of their generosity, in honor of one year of doll patterns, one lucky person will win a $1,000 gift card to the American Girl store! You can buy as many dolls as your sweetie wants, plus all of the super cool accessories, furniture, etc that any doll would need!! On top of that, we are also offering a $400 shopping spree to Fabric.com!! AND, Create Kids Couture is throwing in $50 worth of doll patterns. So now you can make your sweetie and all of her new dolls beautiful matching boutique clothing!

I don't know about your girls, but our girls here at Create Kids Couture LOVE their American Girl dolls. And if we're being honest, the moms might like the dolls just as much - or even more!! Please make sure to say thank you to these amazing sponsors for making this all possible:

ReBlinged

 

Ja'Dior Couture Tots

 

Cupcake Express

 

Posh Little People

 

Adorn with AandM

 

IzZyBeLLs bLiNg BlInG

 

Liam's Loft

 

Love Baby J

 

Jilly Bugs

 

 

Me Tutu

 

Pink Toes & Hairbows

 

Marili Jean

 

Courtney Marie Jewelry

 

Preppy Personals

 

Frills N Fluff

 

Yummi Pouch

 

 Jet'aime Boutique Photography

 

Cookie Crumbs Couture

 

Bella Blossoms

 

Purple Monster Coupons

 

Couture Phantasies

 

Ashley Lozano Jewelry

 

Tiny Dreamers Designs Beaded Necklaces

 

Blessed and b.LOVE.d

 

Swanky Shank

 

Southern Bling Bowtique

 

TuTu Fancy Designs

 

Ma Cherie for Kids

 

2 Chicks & A Cause

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Converting CKC Dresses into Skirts

Oh, how I have been looking forward to this blog post! My daughter and I both love skirts. CKC has some really great skirt patterns and today I'm going to show you how even our dress patterns can be used to make skirts! There are two different ways that I like to do this conversion and I will walk you through them step by step.

But before I get to that I want you to notice the gorgeous fabrics I used!  All of the new fabric combos in this blog post came from Katie's Quilt Shop, one of our blog sponsors and a favorite store of mine. Katie is so great to work with and is even offering a coupon code to our fans! Details are at the end of the post.

 Alright let's get started. The first method we can use to turn a dress into a skirt is to mash up (or combine) two different patterns: a CKC dress pattern and a CKC skirt pattern.  The skirt above just happens to be made using my two very favorite CKC patterns! Here's how I did it:

I took the skirts from Poppy's Peekaboo Dress on the left, and instead of attaching them to the standard Poppy's bodice, I attached them to the waistband from Daphne's Bubble Skirt on the right!  I basically just opened up both patterns on my computer and followed the steps from one and then the steps from the other.  

 It is important to do a quick calculation before we begin, to make sure the finished skirt will end up the length that we want it to be. We can add the length of the waistband to the length of the skirt and then adjust either of them if necessary by adding or subtracting length. In our example here, I left the waistband exactly as it was and added three inches in length to the skirts, mostly because my daughter is tall and growing like a weed. Some may prefer it shorter - that's the beauty of sewing our own cute clothes! We both love how it turned out.

I also LOVE the bow in back of Daphne's. Now I have my two favorite CKC features all wrapped up into one skirt! It's perfect for Valentine's Day and on into the warmer months.

The best part of all this is that we can do it with any of our favorite dress patterns and skirt patterns! We have such a variety of waistbands and skirts to choose from. I use the Izzy's Skirt waistband on a lot of my skirts too.

Now on to the second method for converting CKC dresses into skirts.  For this one all we need is one dress pattern and a few instructions that I'm giving you below.

I decided to put together this part of the tutorial using Piper's Stripwork Maxi Dress. I could have chosen a much simpler one but I wanted to show that any dress can become a skirt! In this method we are basically going to use the skirt portion and create an elastic casing at the top.

Step One: Look at the type of skirt on the dress you have chosen and decide if it needs the length adjusted. For example, if the dress normally has a high bodice we may want to subtract from the skirt length. Or if the style of the dress is shorter than we want our skirt to be, we may want to add length. Make note of any changes you want to make to the skirt.

Step Two: If our model is available, we want to measure from her waistline down to where we want the skirt to end, to double check what we calculated in the first step.  If the dress has multiple tiers or ruffles, keep that in mind. Once we know how to adapt the length for our skirt, we will finally add 1 1/4" to that length, to allow for the elastic waist casing.

Step 3: Cut and sew the skirt portion of the dress according to the pattern instructions.  (I love how this stripwork looks already! Such pretty fabrics!)

 Notice that my top tier is a little longer than the other tiers. This is to allow for the casing. 

Step 4: To create our casing, we are now going to fold the upper edge in 1/4" and press. Then fold in another 1" and press.

Step 5: Stitch around the casing 1/8" up from the fold, being sure to leave a 1 1/2" opening where we will insert the elastic. 

Size	Waist Elastic Cut 1 3/4 " wide
6-12 months	17"
12-18 months	17.5"
2T	18"
3T	18.5"
4T	19"
5T	19.5"
6	20"
7	20.5"
8	21"

Step 6: Cut elastic according to the chart above. If you don't have the chart handy each time, keep in mind that you can also measure your child's waist and subtract one inch to get this measurement. Insert the elastic, attach the ends, and stitch the casing closed. Stretch the waistband to adjust the gathers. 

And we're done!  Isn't it beautiful?  It came out to the EXACT measurement that I wanted it to be.

The twirling princess is more than happy with her new one-of-a-kind skirt.  Wasn't that fun?  I hope you will all try out making some skirts of your own!  (You can even replicate this exact skirt using Piper's pattern and Katie's fabrics!) 

One more tip I have about skirts - my daughter loves wearing them with her white Marilyn's dress, as you can see in the pictures. This free pattern can be a staple that matches almost any skirt and it also serves as an under slip. She loves that she can throw on the dress and the skirt and then add any extra accessories to make it pop. So simple and so classy!  I love the versatility of CKC patterns. 

Now let's get back to that coupon code. If you loved these fabric combos as much as I did, be sure to visit Katie's Quilt Shop!  She's dreamy to work with and she is offering our fans 10% off every purchase using the code LOVECKC at checkout. I couldn't stop smiling as I browsed her fabric lines - I definitely recommend them, especially her princesses, superheroes, and mermaids! So cute and excellent quality too. 

We hope you have learned a lot from this tutorial today. We'd love to see the unique skirts you come up with. 

Let's Create! ~ Kristen