American Girl doll (Carpatina) summer dress(es)

Yes, I've been sewing... American Girl doll clothes again (to no one's surprise, since I seem to be addicted). I've been waiting to show you this, but it... er... got complicated.

I came across this cute free pattern here. It was written for the Carpatina doll (who is very slim), but it gave instructions on adjusting the pattern to fit an AG doll. The dress was easy to sew, but some knowledge of sewing is essential, because the instructions were kind of skimpy, and a bit confusing since the fabric in the photos appeared to be the same on the right and wrong sides. Plus, at one point it said to turn the bodice "inside out", where it really should've said "right side out". There's a difference! But if you know what you're doing, you won't have any trouble making the dress.

I love how it turned out!

I loved it so much, in fact, that I decided I wanted to keep it for Kit, rather than give it to Courtney for Marie Grace as I'd intended. :) Especially since it went with Kit's panties so perfectly. Heheh.

I wasn't sure how Courtney would feel about letting Kit have it. But when I mentioned it, she was so mature and generous as she said: "Well, Grandma, you make all the clothes, so you should be the one to decide who gets them." (I wish you could've heard that... the way she said it was so cute!) So Kit gets to keep the dress. :)

Of course I told Courtney I'd make another dress for Marie Grace. So together we picked out fabric for it. This is not the fabric we picked:

Ha. Long story. In a bit. First, here are the "girls" together, in their new dresses (only one pair of white shoes, so now they're both barefoot):

Do you know how hard it is to get 2 dolls to stand up together and look nice without tipping over?! Almost as hard as with real kids!! :)

Anyway, the fabric Courtney and I picked is in this dress:

However, even though I had the fabric all marked as to where to cut it, I guess I fell asleep or went on auto-pilot or something, and I just cut along the pattern instead of on the marks for the longer skirt! Grrr. So then I thought about seaming it back together. But then I thought it might look nicer with a contrasting fabric at the bottom, so I went to see what I had that would go well.

THAT'S when I found the orange fabric (which is actually a little less reddish than it looks in the photo) above! It was just the right size that I knew I could get a whole dress cut out of it, and it was so pretty, so that's how the orange dress came about. :)

I then looked online to find a pic of the dress on a doll to see exactly how short it was, and I saw it pictured with leggings! Cute! So that's what I decided to do... leave it short and make leggings to go with it. I discovered I already had a pattern for leggings, so then I dug around for an old T-shirt (thanks, Jess, for leaving some stuff behind), and voilà! I had leggings. They were sooo easy to make... I can see myself making lots more out of all kinds of cute fabrics!

After making the leggings, I thought maybe the dress should have a little white shirt of some kind to complete the outfit. I could've used the same T-shirt (it was huge... remember back when everybody wore those oversized tops?!), but I needed something thinner, because I've discovered Marie Grace is just a teensy bit chubbier than Kit, and her dress fit very snugly. As I was digging through fabrics again, I discovered a piece of red twill(?) that gave me another idea. A little jacket instead of a shirt. And wouldn'tcha know, I just happened to have a bolero pattern, too! So here we have the completed ensemble:

I'm pretty pleased with it all. Courtney was, too... she liked it even better than the orange dress.

I was going to take out the pink ribbons from Marie Grace's hair, since they didn't exactly match the red, but they seemed to be knotted quite a number of times, so they stayed in. ;)

Sorry this got so long. But now you know how my brain works sometimes. (And how it doesn't other times, e.g. cutting the skirt.)