Saturday Night sewing

Of the oh maybe two or three people out there who read this, do any of you remember the joy that is the American Girls Doll collection? I read ALL the books back in the day, and signed up for the catalog (which I get randomly every once in a while, sent to Cassie Elliott of course and to my parents address) and I would spend FOREVER drooling over all the cool stuff, but most particularly over her:

Meet Kirsten. MY American Girl. I don't know why she became my favorite, I mean she's blonde. I usually detested anything blonde, since I am brunette and my seemingly perfect younger sister is blonde. Oh well, for whatever reason Kirsten captured my attention and it has been love ever since.

I was always going to save up to buy a Kirsten doll. But anyone that knows me knows that I am NOT a patient person. I was worse as a child. And $100 (plus tax and shipping & handling!) is a LOT of money for a little girl who doesnt get an allowance. I did have a paper route with my dad for awhile, but that money seemed to disappear real fast.

I never did get my Kirsten. I compromised at one point and ordered a Megan doll from the JC Penneys catalog, one of the Magic Attic Club girls or something like that. American Girl wannabes! I saved a whopping $25 by getting that imposter, but to be fair I did really like Megan. She's a brunette. I still have her, and she's nice, but just no Kirsten.

Now, my littlest sister Hannah has fallen in love with the American Girl Dolls (via one of those random catalogs addressed to me that showed up at their house some time back). Hannah's much smarter than me. She made a deal with Mom & Dad that if she came up with half the amount for a Julie doll (she's a Flower Child one, she wasn't around back in my day) she would get the doll as a birthday present. The kids now get an allowance (I've already expounded to my parents how unfair that is, to no avail) and my mom had a paper route during the summer that the three youngest kids took turns helping with and got some money from.

And Hannah stuck to it! She saved half the amount, and so yesterday was her birthday so she got her Julie doll! She was SO EXCITED...Mom had told her earlier in the week that she needed to have a clean room so that she had somewhere nice to put the doll. That bedroom was spotless within 2 days, and has STAYED spotless. (It was a disaster beforehand.)

So, I decided as a birthday present for her I would try my hand at sewing some doll clothes. I discovered I like sewing doll clothes...I don't have to chase the doll around and force her into the outfit to see how its fitting. Megan doesn't move, what a nice change from Maddy!!! I didnt get to this project until Saturday night, and spent a good 3 hours doing it so that it would be done for Hannah's birthday yesterday. I did run into a few problems, but I'll explain later along with the pics because this post is getting long enough as it is!

First, I was going to make a tutu. I didn't use elastic, like the tutu I made for Maddy, because my doll has a hard plastic body and American Girl dolls have cloth bodies, so I didn't feel like risking it. The gold tulle is from my wedding (kinda...the first wedding planned my colors were gold and a deep red, so my mom bought 10 yards of gold tulle; about two weeks later we called the wedding off. In the end we got married in May, and the colors looked too wintery to me so we used a light pink instead of gold. So now there's 10 yards+ of gold tulle to get used.) The ribbon around the top was more ribbon that was used to wrap some of our wedding presents.

It looks really cute on the dolls, but I was too lazy to put it on, plus I haven't made a leotard yet.

This is Megan, wearing the dress I made FROM SCRATCH WITHOUT A PATTERN. Well, let me rephrase that...without a bought, tried-and-true pattern. Megan came with a pretty long sleeved dress and I used that to make a pattern for this one. The problems came when I realized that the fabric I used was not stretchy like the dress I patterned it after; and when I sewed it in the order you would sew a full size dress: I sewed up the sides of the dress before I sewed on the sleeves. OOPS!!! It was REALLY hard to sew those sleeves on then because they were so tiny!

Back view, the green ribbon is from our wedding as well...I'm so glad I'm finally getting to use some of it!!

Despite the issues, I was so thrilled with how this dress turned out. I have pictures that I'll post in another blog of some of my teenage attempts at sewing doll clothes...it is really humorous, even I can laugh at myself for it now!