I love Japanese sewing books so was pretty excited to find these two for vintage Barbie dolls.

The first one is called Stylebook of Doll’s Dress by Kate Mitsubachi. The second is Barbie Mode: Dresses for Classic Barbie Dolls, also by Kate Mitsubachi.

These books are both out of print and unavailable new. There are some vendors selling PDF scans of them on Etsy, but this made me uneasy – as a writer myself, I know that “unavailable new” isn’t the same as “in the public domain”. They’re probably still copyrighted material, and since I intend to use the patterns, I hunted down used copies of both books. They weren’t cheap, but they are beautiful. Most of the text is in Japanese, except for titles.

First there are photographs of the garments, as you’d expect. The next section is one I particularly like – it identifies the model of doll wearing each garment, and one book includes a picture of that doll as originally sold.

Then there are the patterns and instructions, again, all in Japanese. It’s a bit of a drag to be unable to read the specified notions or recommended fabric, but the illustrations are pretty easy to follow if you know how to sew. (It’s interesting that one book has the seam allowances included on the pattern pieces and one doesn’t.)

My plan here is to do a Julie & Julia thing and make all of the garments in both books. Here’s my first candidate:

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!