Toca Tailor

Toca Tailor Fairy Tales gives the child the opportunity to create clothing for a boy or girl. The old-fashioned sewing machine, curtains and clothing style look like something from a fairy tale. The child is presented with the ability to design the sleeves, shirt and pants and then can add a hat, scarf and shoes to the clothes they make.

When the app opens, the child must decide if they will make clothes for a boy or girl. After choosing the character, they choose between sewing clothes or picking accessories, such as a hat, scarf or shoes. When they choose to make the clothes, they make the sleeves, the body of the shirt and the pants for the doll. They can choose between 16 different fabric patterns to add to the clothing as well as lengthening or shortening the styles. They can also make pictures of objects around them and use that for a fabric pattern. After the item is made there are eight different clothing details, like buttons or belts.

Controls for Toca Tailor Fairy Tales is very child friendly. First they choose their character, either a boy of a girl. Once that character appears on the screen, players will be able to choose what kind of tops, bottoms, and sleeves their characters are wearing by tapping on them. For instance, tap on the bottoms and you can switch between skinny tights, puffy pants, a long dress, or a really poofy dress. That same can be done with the tops and the sleeves. Once you choose those, you’ll be able to also adjust the length of each by dragging the edges up or down. This makes the tops and bottoms longer or shorter. You can also do the same for the sleeves.

Once you have the clothing set, you can go on to adding patterns to them. Click on the pattern maker on the bottom left and this will bring you to a table like layout where you’ll be able to swipe between different parts of your clothing. At the bottom are the patterns you can use. Just drag the patterns to your clothing to add them. Patterns can be stacked on top of each other and can also be resized and moved around. On top of that, and this is the neatest feature, you can make your own patterns by taking pictures of anything you see. Just point your camera and shoot and your new pattern will be saved to the app to use.

After that’s complete, you can start adding accessories. In this version of the app, you’ll able to add several hats, masks, beards, and shoes.

This app was reviewed with elementary aged children with developmental disabilities and autism. They enjoyed making the clothing for the children and changing the colors and styles. They also loved taking a picture of their creation and bringing it home to talk about. This app is excellent resource for teaching names of clothing and colors. It can be used for teaching following directions and as a conversational tool. It is a good reward and reinforcement for lessons taught in therapy.

Toca Tailor Fairy Tales is recommended for typically developing users and individuals diagnosed with autism, developmentally delayed, Down syndrome, and speech and language disorder. Toca Tailor Fairy Tales really is a uniquely creative app for children. It’s fun, very easy to use, and as far as my kid goes, he has a ball playing it. Some of the stuff he comes up with is surprising which is create because I’m always trying to push the boundaries of his imagination. This app will do that and allow your child to really push their creativity.