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About Me
Hi! I'm Christine Loff. I have been sewing since I was four.
My mother was a tailor, trained in England, and she decided I should receive the typical training in sewing, knitting and crochet that any European girl would have. At an early age, I learned to knit and sew dolls clothes for my Barbie dolls!
At age 14, my mother began to train me in tailoring, and by the time I was 18, I was making suits, jackets and overcoats. I still think hand-made clothes are the best!
Although I like sewing for fun, I didn't become a tailor. I went to university to study fine art, graphic design and psychology. But I still sewed my own clothes the whole time.
I had always wanted to learn how to draft and drape patterns. So eventually, I returned to school to study apparel design and graduated from the Program in Apparel Design, Department of Clothing and Textiles, University of Manitoba. I loved learning to be able to design any clothing I could conceive of and to draw a pattern from scratch!
In 2008, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the beginning of 2009, I was scheduled for a major operation--a double mastectomy with reconstruction. I was in hospital for a week, and had to spend almost 5 months recuperating at home.
It was during my recuperation that I discovered my love of designing and sewing clothes for fashion dolls! I have collected dolls, mainly fashion dolls for a number of years. But I hadn’t really sewn any clothes for them, just for myself.
However, I had received a new Tonner Basic Tyler Wentworth when I got out of hospital, and there she was, sitting by my bed side, begging for clothes. I decided sewing doll clothes was the ideal activity to spend my time on during recovery. And I discovered it was really fun and that I could use all my sewing and design skills on doll clothes. And dolls don't have fitting issues. They will cheerfully stand for hours in the all-together while you try on half sewn garments on them. And they don't complain about pins!
I've been sewing dolls clothes for my extensive collection of dolls since then, although I still sew clothes for myself and my husband. My doll fashions have been featured in Fashion Doll Quarterly and displayed in the collection of Doll Couture Shops.
I have put up this site to help others learn how much fun it is to sew your own doll clothes. I hope you will learn a lot about sewing clothes for your fashion dolls and do come back to visit often.
