I started with the basic T-shirt pattern from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds, which is an absolute classic, a super versatile pattern with both short- and long-sleeved versions. It's perfectly fitted to the waist of the modern American Girl doll, so much so that you need to be very precise about where you place the back fasteners--
--and you'd likely need to alter that part of the pattern if you were sewing for a wider doll.
-and for fussy cutting elements from existing T-shirts. This perfectly proportioned Hawaii graphic T-shirt--
--came from a shirt that once upon a time belonged to a small daughter!
I also liked transforming a once VERY well-loved horse print daughter's shirt--
--into one that looks just like it, but smaller:
A few of these shirts in, though, I figured out that if I altered the pattern a little bit, I could actually cut the pieces to utilize the existing hems of old T-shirts, AND I could also seam rip off and use their neck ribbing, which I think makes the shirts look very realistic, as well as being more eco-friendly:
I also realized that I only have to zigzag seams along the neck and waist, so the top-stitching looks much neater!
The vintage shirt that I cut this T-shirt from was very pilled, so I didn't give this piece to my niece. I love it, though--it reminds me of my 70s childhood!
The exact color match of the neck ribbing to the rest of the T-shirt is the main detail in making the doll T-shirt look realistic, and that's completely solved when you upcycle an old T-shirt:
It's interesting to me to contrast the first T-shirt I made, on the left, to one of the more recent ones:
I was also trying to upcycle an old jersey knit pillowcase, including its existing seam, for that shirt on the left, and that didn't do it any favors.
There really is real benefit it making 100 of the same thing--every 20th iteration, you figure out how to make it a little better or you get an idea of how to do it a little differently!
I cannot emphasize strongly enough how SATISFYING these little T-shirts are to make. From fussy cutting tiny pieces to precisely top-stitching tiny seams, I swear that I spent half my summer humming happily to myself, listening to the latest Mumford & Sons album over and over and over again, and sewing doll T-shirts.
We didn't do a big summer trip this year, so I had to do something to keep myself entertained, I guess!
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So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:
I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass.
But I did not actually vomit!
But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.
Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!
I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!
MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!
It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.
The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--
Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look!
--and the other!
You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off!
My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--
--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:
I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:
My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!
Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?
Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.
That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!
Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets.
And here we go!
I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!
The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?
Hahahahaha... nope!
Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then!
This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:
And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:
All better!
So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.
It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:
She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:
The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!
The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up!
I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol.
Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.
A whole bunch of spins.
If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.
So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.
Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!
My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.
Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!
Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:
Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!
So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?
Yeah...
But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.
Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!
Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.
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You can take the redneck out of the South (or rather, she can flee it on her own two feet, lol), but you CANNOT take the camouflage out of the redneck's wardrobe rotation!
Not out of her wardrobe rotation. Not out of her child's wardrobe rotation, since the camo print fabric that I used to sew these eensy American Girl doll camo capris actually came from a pair of my older daughter's old camo pants--after she outgrew them, I obviously tossed them into my fabric stash, because that was some nice quality fabric, not to mention CAMO!
And, it turns out, not even out of her niece's American Girl doll's wardrobe rotation, since that's where these adorable little camouflage ruffled capri pants are headed. Here's a pic of the outfit in progress modeled by my most helpful buddy, this American Girl doll that I found at Goodwill for $7.99:
The kids don't mind when I dig out their dolls and dress them up as my sewing models, but I know how precious those dolls are to them so I don't feel quite comfortable just keeping them out and about all the time while I'm working. My little Goodwill buddy has been an awesome solution, and is even collecting her own little wardrobe of... let's call them "second-quality" handmade garments, ahem.
The capri pants pattern comes from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds, which is hands-down my favorite 18-doll pattern book that I've used so far. Ruffled capris don't have quite the versatility of some of her other patterns (I have made about 5,000 of those T-shirts so far!), but I managed to put together a couple of different looks for my niece's birthday package.
The younger kid dressed this doll up in the layered T-shirt look for this photo, but the actual outfit that I sent my niece is the marbled purple T-shirt, sewn from an adult T-shirt, and the purple and black ruffled capris, sewn from a huge batik wall hanging that I found at Goodwill (I sewed another part of that giant batik into this witch hat!):
Actually, ALL of the components of this outfit, from the purple T-shirt to the batik wall hanging to the doll herself, came from Goodwill!
I paired the camouflage ruffled capris (with ruffles made from stash quilting cotton) with a T-shirt sewn from an old T-shirt of Mr. Craft Knife's that had also found its way into my fabric stash (mwa-ha-ha, because it was a really ugly shirt):
What I really need for this ruffled capris pattern is a shirt pattern to pair with it that can also be made from quilting cotton, not jersey knit. Then I could use the same fabric for the shirt and the ruffles, and the outfit would be so mitchy-matchy!
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Have you ever been hiking and come across a really cool animal track? Maybe you don’t know what animal made it, or maybe you do know, but the track is just so perfect that you wish you could bundle it up and take it home to admire? Maybe you’ve got a kid who loves animals and nature, who could use a little hands-on science enrichment?
You need to know how to field cast.
Field casting is easy, requiring just plaster of Paris, used cardboard food packaging, masking tape, and water. It won’t take a ton of time away from your hike, and it’ll leave you with a great memory and a useful piece of scientific evidence for studying the real animals who’ve walked your path.
Here’s how:
1. Find an animal track. We’ve chosen to hike in the woods behind our house the day after a big rainfall, and my ten-year-old finds just what we’d expect to find: deer tracks!
2. Make a cardboard collar around the track. Cut strips of the cardboard food packaging about 1″ wide and long enough to completely encircle the track; tape pieces together with masking tape to lengthen them if necessary.
Tape the two ends together into a collar that will circle the track.
3. Mix the plaster of Paris. Although there are specific ratios of plaster to water that will guarantee a standard result (and I used to do all our field casting that way), I went on a dino dig earlier this summer and learned there how to simply eyeball my plaster mixture. In a throwaway plastic cup that’s at the end of its life, dump some dry plaster, then add some water and stir with a stick. You’re looking for a pudding consistency, better thin than thick, so continue to gradually add plaster or water to reach this approximate consistency.
4. Pour into the animal track. We always need two people for this, one person to steady the collar and one person to actually pour.
The thinner the consistency of the plaster of Paris is, the better it will fill the animal track without bubbles, but the longer it will take to cure–use your own judgment about how much free time you have to kill making field casts on your hike.
5. Remove the cast. When the plaster is firm to the touch, you can remove the cast and clean up your work.
The field cast will be dirty, but you can rinse it, and then label or paint it.
If you’d like to hang the field cast on your wall later (we do this sometimes), unbend a paperclip into a hook, then embed it in the plaster after you’ve poured it.
If you’ve got an extra-savvy kid who needs a science fair project, have them see what information they can learn about an animal based solely on its track. Height? Weight? Age?
This is also a great technique to employ if you happen to come across an animal track that you can’t identify. You might come up with the first conclusive evidence of the elusive Sasquatch, or the wily chupacabra!
Actually… I have a story about the chupacabra. Buy me a margarita sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.
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To be fair, 1) my own children egged me on in my impulse to keep the most adorable pair of American Girl doll pajamas that I sewed ostensibly for part of my niece's birthday present, and 2) I did sew my niece another pair of American Girl doll pajamas to make up for it.
Can you look at that above photo and guess which pair of pajamas I ended up keeping for our own American Girl doll collection?
This one!!!!!
Once upon a time, the big kid had the CUTEST pair of jammy pants that I made from this flannel dino fabric, and I also made endless other kid things from it, from crayon rolls Christmas stockings. When the big kid got more into horses than dinosaurs for a while, the little kid took up the mantle of lover of dinosaurs, and then you know a homeschooling mom can't let any kid interest alone so I got involved, too, and the culmination of all of this seems to mostly have been that when I showed around this brand-new pair of flannel dino pajamas that I'd just sewn for my niece's birthday box to each kid in turn, each kid in turn's eyes got very big and they each said, "AWWWWWWW!"
And then they both started saying stuff like, "Our cousin [Name Redacted] doesn't even like dinosaurs! She likes rainbow unicorns! We should probably keep the dinosaur pajamas so she doesn't have to look at them. Ooh, can you make a little robe to go with it?!? Can you make a little dino stuffie for her to snuggle?" And so on and so on.
Not that my arm had to be pulled very much, though--I think these particular pajamas are adorable and immediately coveted them, too!
What I'm actually going to do is dig through my fabric stash to see if I can muster up just enough of this dino flannel to make one more pair of American Girl doll pajamas, because I think I've found the only thing in our entire home that my kids would even possibly fight over after my death.
ANYWAY!
These adorable pajamas are the Monkey Pajamas pattern from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds. This book has so many classic patterns that I think are super versatile, including this one. You do need to figure out and add your own finishing bits, though, especially if you don't use a serger. I've got a lot of her patterns pretty well down pat by now, though, so I automatically top-stitch the seams, and figure out for myself what kind of fastening I want:
Tidily top-stitched shoulder seam!
The original pattern calls for the pajama top front/back to also be sewn from the secondary fabric, but I wasn't feeling it, at least for these pajamas. I think they look cute enough with a contrasting fabric just at the wrists and ankles:
Kids who want everything around them to look like it was dunked in magical rainbow unicorn vomit do sometimes get beyond that (case in point: my own kid!), so I didn't do every single piece of doll clothing for my niece in pinks and purples and sparkles. Sometimes you just want to throw on your comfiest pair of brown flannel pjs and kick back with a book in front of the fire!
Although these specific garments look VERY pajama-y, I think that both parts of the Monkey Pajamas pattern are actually quite versatile, especially as a basic top and bottom made from woven, not knit, fabrics. I need to dig through my stash to find some thin denim, which I think would be perfect to make doll jeans using this pattern, cuff and all. I'd probably omit the cuff on the top, though, if I was making anything other than a pajama top. I think it would work very well with novelty quilting cotton, though, particularly a small print that would look proportionate to the doll. Very Hawaiian shirt-esque!
Here's everything that I've sewn for my niece's American Girl doll so far:
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