sewing Blythe tights

Having mastered the sock creation process, I set out next to make Blythe tights.

O, hubris.

I bought this pattern, but since I am a sewing ignoramus, I was halted in my tracks here. I think this particular pattern is for people with more sewing experience (or general spatial skills) than I have. Ones who can just see pattern pieces and know how they go together, either because they've done a lot of sewing or they can bend things in their mind in a way I can't. If there are written instructions for actually sewing the pieces together somewhere in the pattern pdf, I missed them. But truthfully I have a hard time understanding written instructions anyway. Recipes, maps, directions, rights versus lefts, cardinal directions... all bewilder me. So I don't really know that even a very detailed pattern could have helped me.

I sat for several hours trying to figure these out on my own. I thought surely I could... I had made socks, hadn't I?? I tried to hold the fabric pieces to each other in different configurations. I just really couldn't see how to pin the pieces so they'd become tights.

Finally I went to YouTube and found this tutorial, which was instrumental in guiding me through the process, and... victory!!!

Uhh... I mean, they're a little too long.

But listen! I have many pairs of Blythe tights that don't fit perfectly! I have an ancient sheer green pair acquired secondhand I quite like that are very ill-fitting -- way, way too long. So I was only stoked. For a first attempt, these look pretty good. If you don't lift up Fidelia's skirt, you'd never know. (These particular pics are phone pics taken in my always-dark bedroom, so the colors are a little off. They're actually rusty orangey-brown, as pictured in the other pics in this post.)

It took making a few not-so-great pairs for me to actually figure out how to get the tights to really fit, both length-wise and waistband-wise. To acquire the right dolly-sized elastic and discover the best practices for ease and efficiency in sewing them up.

Construction-wise, I looked closely at Simply Bubble Boom's pink stock tights to see if I could do anything differently. In my opinion, aside from being made by machine and some aesthetic differences in the waistband (the manufacturers for the official stock used even smaller elastic and let it be totally visible on the inside of the waistband, whereas I hide the elastic within the waistband), they look pretty identical.

I'm not good enough with a machine to be using it to make these. So all the tights and socks I've made are hand-sewn, and thus don't have robotically even stitches, and such. But I'm proud this is something I have managed to tackle.

Thank goodness for YouTube and for people who work to make tutorials of all types that others can access for free. I never would have figured out how to put these together on my own.