Dollieh Sanctuary

Got any good ideas to help with doll and/or people laundry?

Older Barbie clothes might bleed while drying. I had a few 70s-80s dresses laying too close to some other things and they bled.

Red and red-black vintage things like to bleed and bleed and bleed.

I discovered dish washing powder works to freshen dingy whites if you don't have or can't use bleach. I washed some white based print sheets and they looked much better, especially the pillow cases. Might work to get greasy stains out. I haven't tested printed designs.

Some stuff my Gram taught me about doll laundry:

If you know things are colorsafe and can be washed, you can put them in a lingerie bag and put them through the machine with the rest of your stuff instead of hand-laundering. it

A blow dryer can be used if you have something too delicate for the dryer and air drying isn't practical. It can even be used to reshape the item a bit after being squished in the wash (eg, to refluff a ballgown you can blow dry from inside the skirt up towards the bodice to make the skirt puff out a bit) Just keep it on a lower or middle setting and don't hold it too close to the item.

To get cleaned and dried stuff back into shape, a mini iron is handy. They make them for quilting and appliques mostly. The one I use is by Clover, it looks kind of like a wand with a tiny iron tip on the end. There's a regular and an interchangeable one, and its honestly worth the extra few bucks for the interchangeable. It works best to have very lightly damp fabric or to mist the fabric first before pressing. Do be careful with the "neck" of the iron though because it gets way hotter than the tip and can scorch your fabric or you.

Also for color bleed, there's a lot of remedies for it. This site has a pretty good run down of all the ones I've used plus some more.


Oh and if you're like me and buy a lot of Barbie clothes bundles at Goodwill and then end up with a bunch of decently made but ugly/bad/questionble fabric and color choice items, you should give a shot at dying them. A packet of Rit goes a very long way with doll clothes. My favorite to use is brown, because it can do just a faint mellowing or a full blown dinge depending on the amount of dye. You can also experiment with the color wheel a bit to get some interesting things going on, deepen a color, add another tone to change it completely, or add in its opposite to mellow it. I've used cleaned out mason jars as test tubes to individually dye pieces, real handy since theyre clear. Do remember though that some fabrics won't take the dye like others will so always keep an eye on whats going on.

A hair straightener/flat iron is great to quickly get the wrinkles out of doll clothes, just make sure the heat setting is right for the fabric type. Great for a quick fix before a meetup of photoshoot as well as clothes that got squashed in the mail or in storage.