Just When I Thought I Was Done . . .

Making clothes for my daughter, she requested for her birthday (through daddy, of course) a matching outfit for her and her American Girl doll. She said it didn't matter if mom made it. I'll take that as a compliment; if she thinks what I make is as good as RTW then that's a good thing. While she was gone to camp, my son and I got to work. We first checked the AG website to see what things were available. He informed me that she had seen this top in a catalog and really, really wanted it:

We looked at a few other things, in case we couldn't find the right fabric and then went fabric shopping. I already had denim in the stash and decided to make full length jeans instead of the matching cropped trousers shown on the website. I just made her 4 pair of cropped trousers, and these trousers will be better for fall/winter.

We couldn't find an exact match for the striped fabric, but this is what we came up with:

The jeans are BWOF 7/07, #130 in size 134. They're pretty similar to the other pairs of trousers I've made recently with top stitching, zip fly and buttonhole elastic in the waistband, so I won't show you those. The doll trousers were top stitched with a fake fly and front pockets to match the girl trousers and included real back pockets like the larger version.

(Side note: I think I'm certainly getting my money's worth from the BWOF subscription. This is the 5th garment I've made up in the last 3 weeks, plus I have 2 more traced and two more definitely going to be traced and made.)

The top started out as Simplicity 9362, but went through a few changes. All of doll clothes are from the good old workhorse of doll patterns, Butterick 5604.

To make the top, I first took a look at a similar top my son has. I discovered that there are two sleeves sewn as one into the armhole. That was very easy to copy - I just made both the short and long sleeves and set them into the armhole as one. The hood required a bit more work. I traced off my son's hood and made it a bit bigger, as she's bigger than he is. I also made sure that the hood would fit around the neckline of the top. To attach the hood, I attached is the same way as my son's: I placed the neck binding to the shirt, right sides together, and then the hood on top of that, right sides together and serged the whole thing. When turned, you have the contrast hood coming out of the top of the neckline, plus neckline trim. This is case where just some careful investigation will allow you to copy RTW pretty easily.

In this picture, you can see the layering of the neck seam; shirt, binding and hood.

My son picked out a dragonfly applique for the top, and as I didn't have a tiny one for the doll top, I had to improvise with some beads and sequins:

She was very excited and put on the top as soon as she opened the gift, so it was worth a little extra time and effort to make one (well, two, if you count the doll outfit) more outfit for her!

Thank you all for the compliments on her birthday dress! She loves it, which is important to me, because I know she'll wear it if she likes it!

Parting Shot: Here she is actually opening the doll outfit. I wrapped each outfit separately, so she didn't know she had a matching set until all the presents were opened.