49 Cent Friday: American Girl Doll Refashion

It’s finally Friday! Woohoo!

For today’s 49-cent Friday refashion, I started out with this top I purchased a while ago.

Aeropostale cable-knit sweater

Not too bad…other than being a bit snug and not quite as long as I would prefer.

While trying to decide what to refashion this into, my daughter informed me that she wanted more clothes for her American Girl Doll.

My thought was, “I’d rather not spend more on clothes for your doll than I’m willing to spend on clothes for myself” (But I just kept those thoughts to myself).

So I decided to refashion an outfit for her doll, using the aforementioned sweater.

First, I slid the sleeve up to the doll’s waist, like so.

Cuff-side up!

I cut a little notch where I wanted the length of the skirt to be (adjusting for the seam allowance).

Like so.

After taking the sleeve off the doll, I finished cutting from the notch.

Snip!

Then I folded the raw edge under and under again and pinned it all around!

Pinned!

All that’s left to do is sew.

Stitch that skirt!

Well, what do you think?

A cute little sweater-skirt.

I didn’t want to end the refashion here, having only used part of one sleeve of the sweater. So I decided to make a pair of tights to go with the doll’s skirt.

I once again pulled the sleeve up to the doll’s waist (cuff side up).

Look at all that pink!

The next thing to do was pin between the legs to show where I needed to sew.

Here’s a closer look.

Before I took the sleeve off of the doll, I snipped off the sleeve where the bottom (feet) of the tights were going to be.

Snippety snip!

Now here comes where I had a bit of a misstep.

(If you were paying close attention to the above pictures, you may have already caught my mistake.)

I should’ve turned the sleeve inside out before doing all of my pinning. Oops! But, unfortunately, I didn’t catch my mistake until sewing the little area below the crotch.

Oops!

Well, the only thing to do is pull out my trusty little seam ripper and get to ripping!

Mistake be gone!

Now that I fixed my mistake, I sewed the crotch area again…this time with the sleeve turned inside out.

Then I sewed the inside seams of what will be the legs of the tights.

See?

Then I sewed the toe seams.

Toe seams stitched.

Yay! Almost done! All that’s left to do is separate those legs (Oh, that didn’t sound right did it? Sorry!).

Separating (with scissors, mind you).

Hey, pretty snazzy huh?

Pretty in pink.

Now at this point, I realized that I still had only used about half of the sleeves, and still had this much of the sweater left…

Lots of leftover sweater!

I didn’t want you guys to feel jipped from this weeks’ refashion, so I thought I’d make my daughter a matching skirt to go along with her doll’s new attire.

I started by turning the sweater inside-out and pulling it on my daughter. I then pinned it where I would be taking it in.

See?

Then I carefully removed the shirt.

In the process of removing it, I accidentally poked my child. :/ (I guess I should’ve taken my own advice, and used safety pins, as I did in this post).

Anyway, I thought that after stitching the side seams, I would need to make a casing for the elastic waist-band. But after taking in the sides, and trimming off the sleeves, I realized it fit perfectly without the extra work. And since the new waist was the old neck of the sweater, it was already finished. Rock on!

Look, matching outfits!

So for 49-cents I was able to make my daughter a skirt, her doll a matching skirt, and a pair of tights (plus with the remaining partial sleeves, I’ll be able to make 2 more pair of tights for her other dolls).

Pretty good considering most of the American Girl matching outfits you can purchase for your girl and her doll cost a whopping $70 on average (and that’s being conservative).

Do any of you know of any little girls who are as fanatical about American Girl as my little girl?

Do you have a fantastic refashion that you’ve done, or seen on Pinterest perhaps?

I’d love to hear more!

~Jen

P.S. Any who read my previous post, regarding the Ugly Coat Refashion, I want to let you know that once I figure out exactly how I plan to refashion it, I will start posting and let you see how it goes. I’ve got to be honest and let you know that I’m a little intimidated. I’ve never refashioned a coat before (especially such a big, thick, heavy thing like that). But win, lose, or draw, I’ll show you how it goes. And there’s a good chance it will be done in several posts! So hang in there with me, and I’m always open to your comments/advice/ideas! I really appreciate all of you who commented on the post and the MadMama Facebook page, with your awesome ideas on how you think it should be refashioned! You guys rock!

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