Q & A - Older Girl's Long Sleeve Dress Pattern

Q - Do you have any suggestions for a long sleeve dress pattern for an older girl?

A - Yes! Although it seems most heirloom patterns for girls are designed with short sleeves, there are some very nice classic styled dresses for older girls that have long sleeve variations.

One such pattern is Victoria Lynn from Kay Guiles Designs. It's a dropwaisted dress pattern in sizes 4 - 14 and includes several elegant heirloom collar variations. A matching dress pattern for the 18 inch dolls is also available.

View Victoria Lynn

Another great pattern, available in sizes 6 - 16, can be found in Contemporary Heirlooms For Older Girls, a pattern/book by Martha Pullen. The patterns come with a 79 page book that contains detailed instructions, illustrations and color photographs.

It includes a dress that can be made with or without a collar and can be either sleeveless, short sleeve, 3/4 sleeve or long sleeve.

View Contemporary Heirloom For Older Girls

Embroidery Designs by Wendy Schoen On Sale

Embroidery Designs For Christmas by Wendy Schoen is an ideal source of designs for all types of decorative hand embroidery projects.

The designs are perfect for techniques such as shadow work, stem or outline stitch, applique and long and short stitch. There are two alphabets, holiday symbols, bells, candles, holly boughs, puppy dogs, kitty cats, snowmen, lambs and much, much more. Over 150 patterns.

Regular price is $15.00, on sale now for only $10.46. Order your copy today!

Adora Dolls and Gotz Dolls - 40% OFF!!!

Many of you know that we are in the processing of closing our doll department. We need the room to expand our heirloom fabrics and patterns plus expand our archival supplies.

All the dolls, their clothes and their accessories have to go, so we're cutting prices. All the beautiful Gotz dolls have been marked down. So far, we have over 1/2 of the Adora Dolls marked down to 40% off. We hope to have the prices on the rest of them reduced within the next few days.

If a particular doll that you want is not yet marked down, let us know and we'll do it for you.

The dolls are so beautiful and we have enjoyed bringing them to you. Take advantage of this opportunity to purchase a 1st quality, new Adora, Gotz or Corolle doll at these very low prices.




Coming up next: We're going to be giving away an Adora doll, no purchase necessary. Stay tuned for more information........

Heirloom Sewing Tip - Lace to Lace

This tip may be particularly helpful to beginners, especially if you are nervous about machine sewing, lace to lace.

I've often recommended using a little piece of tissue as a stabilizer at the beginning of the seam to prevent the lace from being pulled down into the sewing machine feeddogs. That's works fine until you sew past the tissue.

After you get past the tissue, it can get tricky keeping the lace headings butted together and preventing them from overlapping at times. Or trying not to stretch either piece of lace.

With a little practice, you can get the hang of it and will soon be joining lace together like a pro. But what if you don't have time to practice? What if you will be joining yards of lace to lace for a fancy band and need to do it right, the first time, without any mistakes?

Here's a little trick for perfect lace to lace heirloom sewing......

First, get a roll of Floriani Wet-n-Gone Tacky water soluble stabilizer. Yes, I know it is made for machine embroidery, but that's ok, we're going to use it for heirloom sewing anyway. (It comes in a big 10 yd roll that will last you forever, if using it for regular sewing)

Next, cut some strips of the Floriani Wet-n-Gone Tacky. Cut the strips wide enough to accommodate the width of the two pieces of lace that you will be sewing together. (i.e. if you are joining two 1/2 inch wide lace insertion pieces, cut the stabilizer a little over 1 inch wide.) If you have a rotary mat and cutter this part will be a breeze.

Now, peel off the paper backing from a stabilizer strip and neatly place the two pieces of lace on the sticky side of the stabilizer. Make sure the lace is straight, without gaps and not overlapping. Repeat this as many times as needed, depending on the length of the lace that is to be joined.

Next, set your zigzag stitch on your machine and sew away! When you're finished sewing, rinse the lace in water and the Floriani Wet-n-Gone Tacky rinses out completely.

Here's a photo of some lace I joined using this technique. It was fast and easy!

Winter Heirloom Fabrics and Black French Lace

Wool Challis

We absolutely love the beautiful, festive Red Wool Challis from Bear Threads Ltd and we think you will love it too!

Those little square graphic scans of the fabrics on the website don't do the heirloom fabrics justice. The red wool challis is sooooo pretty! It would make up into a gorgeous holiday dress. It's lightweight and drapes beautifully. Very nice. We want you to try it so we put the red wool challis on sale at 25% off.

And speaking of red............

Featherwale Corduroy

The Red Featherwale Corduroy from Fabric Finders is in stock now. These are great fabrics, you can dress them up or dress them down. They are strong and durable, yet almost look like velvet.

The Snow White featherwale corduroy is beautiful! The last time we stocked the Snow White color, it sold out almost immediately.

Black French Lace and English Netting

Since there seems to be a rising interest in black French lace and black English netting, we thought you might like to try some. This is the same heirloom lace that you've being using in white, ivory and ecru, except this is black. It is elegant and pretty.



Stay tuned....................... coming up next, for beginners, a mistake-proof tip on how to sew lace to lace and end up with perfectly straight seams!

Ready To Smock Yoke Dress

We still have a few of the Sew Beautiful Smockables left in stock. They are a white, high yoke poly/cotton blend in Size 2T. At 40% off the retail price you can pick one up for only $24.00!

Here's the link: http://www.heirloomsewingforchildren.com/yoke-dress.htm

Martha Pullen Doll 25% OFF!!!

More Unadvertised Special Sales like we promised! You'll love this special doll baby and with the Precious Baby Doll Clothes patterns by Martha Pullen, you can sew beautiful heirloom doll clothes for her.

Precious One by Middleton Doll

Designed especially for Martha Pullen

Sculpted by doll artist Reva Schick

Emily Isabella

On Sale Now - 25% OFF

Order Emily Isabella today!

Hard to find doll - Limited Quantities

Hannah's Heirloom Play Dress

It sure was hot this summer, especially here in Alabama. On weekends, I spent a lot of time in my sewing room where the air conditioner kept it nice and cool.

One afternoon when I was going through my fabric stash, I came across a piece of Swiss batiste that I had forgotten about. Actually, it was in several pieces. It had originally be used in an experiment years ago when we were testing fabric markers. At the time, I thought one of the pieces was ruined, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out.

I rubbed the Stain Remedy into all the stains and then soaked it overnight in Forever New fabric wash. This had to have been the worst of all the stains I have treated with the Stain Remedy and I really didn't have any expectations of it coming clean. But it did! Amazing, is all I can say about that.

Anyway, the three pieces of fabric only amounted to about 2/3 of a yard, barely enough to make Hannah a summer play dress. I used the biggest piece for the skirt and the smaller pieces for the yokes, found some leftover lace to trim the armholes and neck and made her a sleeveless, shorty dress.

She liked it and that's what counts! It was cool and comfortable for her to wear and she could play outside while wearing it.

P.S. If you would like to try the Stain Remedy and Forever New fabric wash just send us a self addressed, stamped envelope. Enclose a little note with Stain Remedy and Forever New written on it and we'll mail you a free sample of each so that you can try it on those stubborn stains.

Mail it to:

Heirloom Sewing For Children
Dalton Enterprises
P.O. Box 804
Demopolis, AL 36732