Barbie is getting a wedding dress for Christmas — at least she is if Ricky Konshak has anything to say about it.

The micro-seamstress is at it for a third straight year, sewing hundreds of little dresses for Barbie dolls and donating them to charity.

This year, Konshak stitched more than 300 tiny wedding dresses for Christmas Unlimited and Toys for Tots. In what is becoming a holiday tradition, more than 60 of the dresses spent the month of November on display at Brookdale Skyline, a senior-living residence in west Colorado Springs, where Konshak lives.

The wedding-day Barbies are clothed in a variety of styles. Some of the dresses are elaborate and ornate; others are simple and elegant. Some are adorned with beads; others are festooned with ribbons.

“People have told me I should sell them,” she said. “But what fun would that be?”

Konshak has had an affinity for sewing and crocheting for much of her adult life. She began sewing for her four daughters when they were young, she said. Three years ago, she learned that local children’s charities needed dresses for the hundreds of donated Barbie dolls they receive each year.

“They told me they get all these dolls every year, but never any clothes,” she said.

Crocheting by hand, Konshak made 250 dresses in two months’ time and used them to fashion two dozen Barbie care packages, each with a doll, 10 dresses, and shoes.

The process was so much fun, Konshak said, she decided to do it again the following year. She believed she could make more than 250 dresses, so she set a goal of 500.

One dress led to another, which led to another … and ultimately she had crocheted and sewed a whopping 1,200 dresses.

“I just kept crocheting and crocheting,” she said.

Konshak looks at fabric with a different eye than most people. Where some might just see a shower curtain, or a sweatshirt, she sees an opportunity to clothe more dolls.

This year, she found a secondhand wedding dress at a thrift store and saw the chance to dress dozens of Barbies. Carefully dismantling the dress, she turned the pieces into 32 miniature wedding gowns.

For Konshak, the creative process can be a self-perpetuating cycle: the more dresses she makes, the more ideas she gets, which results in more dresses. Sometimes ideas come to her in the middle of the night.

She occasionally gets caught up in a dress-making frenzy and has to set an alarm to remind herself to take a break, Konshak said. Despite the fact that each dress takes 2-3 hours to make, she often sews several per day. During one two-week stretch, she made 52 dresses –- out of sweatshirt sleeves.

When friends and acquaintances offer to help, she can always find something for them to do.  Her daughter, Donna Joost, and neighbors Selva Lawson and Judy Ehnert, help make the tiny veils for the wedding ensembles. Alice VanZante, Konshak’s good friend, attaches the buttons. Walter Moore, whom Ricky calls “Barbie’s sugar daddy,” helps finance the projects with Hobby Lobby gift cards.

An 80-year-old woman in Circleville, Kan., read about Konshak in an earlier Gazette article and reached out to her the old-fashioned way – by writing a letter. Fran Bell, a fellow miniature dressmaker, said she had more boxes of fabric and assorted garnishments than she could use in her lifetime. She offered to send them to Konshak, who happily accepted.

Konshak is already hard at work on next year’s dresses, and, as usual, she’s thinking big. If her plans come to fruition, her four-year dress total will easily eclipse 2,000: “Slinky dresses, sparkly party dresses, felt capes, Christmas dresses, button dresses, velvet dresses…”