If dolly’s frock is of plain material, instead of just hemming the hem, you might like to finish it with French knots along. You must work these with embroidery thread, and you have a picture showing how the knots are made.
Bring your needle up through the double hem on the right side, hold the thread down with the left hand thumb, and pick up a tiny stitch along the hem, just where the thread comes out; now, with the right hand, wind the thread round the needle (just as it is in the picture), pull your needle out, and you will find you have made a little twisted knot. Put your needle down through the hem again close to the knot, and bring it up a little further along the hem, ready for the next knot. Make your knots equal distances apart all round. This is a very good way of finishing any hem, where you do not want a row of hemming stitches showing on the right side.
Bind the neck of the frock with a narrow strip of the material.
Divide the lace into two equal lengths, then cut one length in half again. Pleat the longest piece into the neck of the dress, and one short piece into each cuff. Loop your ribbon up into a little rosette, leaving one or two long loops hanging, and place this on the left side of the yoke. Fasten the frock with buttons and buttonholes at the back.
Making the Coat Dolly wears on [page 82].
Serge would be a good material to use. Half a yard would be sufficient to make it for an 18-inch doll, the size of the one in the picture. Two yards of a tiny white braid were used to trim the coat.
When you have carefully cut out your coat pattern, join up the under-arm and shoulder seams. To join coat seams you must just place the two edges to be joined together evenly, and backstitch them together on the wrong side. To neaten the seams inside the coat, open them out flat and bind each of the raw edges separately. To get them quite flat you will have to press them with a hot iron.
The coat sleeve has two pieces, so you will have two seams to join for each sleeve; join them just as you did the shoulder and under-arm seams, and be careful to get one sleeve the reverse way to the other one.
Now take the front facings, lay them on to the right side of the fronts of the coat (you will see they are just the same shape as the fronts at the outer edges). Backstitch these pieces on to the fronts all round where the edges meet the coat edges, then turn the facings inside the coat. Bind the straight raw edges of the facings that come inside the coat. Turn back the top of each front to form a rever.
Turn a single turning half an inch wide round the bottom of the coat, and backstitch along about a quarter of an inch in from the fold; bind the raw edge of the turning inside the coat. Finish the wrist edges of the sleeves in the same way, and put them into the coat as you put in the dress sleeves; they will need very little gathering.