Sewing American Girl Doll Clothes Is My New Mid-Life Crisis Hobby

One Facebook Story of my little niece holding her brand-new American Girl doll later, and my summer fate is sealed!

The art of sewing doll clothes is fairly new to me, but I always like to learn new things. And once upon a time I would also have told you that the sewing of tiny garments full of fussy, precise details did not appeal to me, but tbh I think that I, myself, am growing fussier as I age, because I kind of don't mind it now. So many precise 1/4" seams! So much tidy edge stitching! Such fussy cutting of novelty prints! I used to hurry through all my sewing to get to the finish as quickly as possible, more than ready to move on to the next exciting thing, but lately I've been pretty into the process, taking my time and focusing on the details and whiling away whole evenings puttering through a project while listening to endless audiobooks.

I just finished Endgame, which was a biography of Bobby Fisher, and now I'm ready for The Long Game, the last book in my hockey smut series!

There are several books of patterns for 18" dolls that I want to sew my way through, and first up is Doll Couture, a book that I actually own but never found the time to dive into when my own little American Girl doll enthusiasts were the right ages to have appreciated my work. Good thing I've got a new audience now!

This simple dress, a sleeveless bodice with a gathered skirt, is my first project:

Highly recommend owning an entire roll of tracing paper--it's so handy!

The instructions in this book are shockingly difficult to parse--they literally didn't tell me that the dress is supposed to come together like this--

--so at every stage I kept trying to sew the skirt into a circle, or stitch the bodice back closed, and once I thought I'd finally figured out what the step I was looking at said to do and ended up sewing the bodice shut at the bottom(?!?), but eventually my very own little Goodwill American Girl doll modeled a well-fitting dress for me:

I literally found her at Goodwill for eight dollars! I LOVE her! I think she's going to be my own personal version of the porch goose, and she's going to have SO many handmade outfits for all seasons and holidays. I need to fix her hair, though, so please send me all your best tips for untangling American Girl doll hair.

And then I sewed another!

I do really like all the tidy details involved, all the edge stitching and stitching down my seams and how nice everything looks when freshly ironed.

Oops, gotta trim that thread!

I experimented with a puffier skirt for the Halloween dress, and I find it much improved.

I really like how well-proportioned small-scale novelty prints look in an 18" doll's garment, and my plan is to use up as many of my novelty prints as possible sewing my niece a wardrobe of doll clothes for her birthday.

I've also been working hard to upgrade my photo set-up:

That's two softboxes plus a giant flexible vinyl panel from Menards that I clamp to my tabletop and sort of slither up the wall to make a seamless backdrop. Vinyl is such a bummer, but I love how it looks.

Now that I've finally cracked what the instructions wanted me to do, this dress is the simplest thing in the world to sew, and it turns out so cute every time. I even upgraded some bits, like fully lining the skirt and finishing the side seams, so mental note to make physical notes so I don't forget!

I considered appliqueing one of the gingerbreads from the skirt fabric onto the bodice, but I thought that it might look too baby-ish to the sophisticated eyes of its future six-year-old recipient. I kind of wish I'd done it anyway, though, because surely one can't have too many gingerbreads on one's outfit!

I had to make myself stop at two dresses for my niece's doll, though, because I have a lot of different patterns that I want to try. But it's surely not too late to sew just a couple of dresses for my own girls' childhood American Girl dolls, so carefully put away in the top of my closet (until I got them out to serve as extra fashion models for these photo shoots, ahem...). 

And of course my own little American Girl doll will need some outfits to wear when she's not helping me out with her fit checks of the garments I'm sewing!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!