I learned to sew because I wanted Barbie dresses that we could not afford. (They were more expensive than my clothes.) So my best friend's mother had the patterns because she loved to sew doll clothes and let Judy & I use the patterns. I did not make clothes for my daughters' dolls because they didn't seem to want them. Also, I had one of those 1973 portable Singer machines with the plastic gears, they were in high school when I finally got a machine that didn't fall apart every time you turned it on. The gears were so bad I couldn't finish a dress without having it go back to the repair shop. (I sewed like crazy in high school on my mother's Singer and this was such a disappointment.)