Little Diva loves her AG dolls. I mean loooooooves them. Her idea of a day in heaven is spent browsing the aisles at the local store and looking at all the beautiful outfits they make for these dolls. Little Diva's other great passion is designing clothes. Reams and reams of paper have been used at our house dedicated to her collections. She even has her future company name and logo picked out!
Perusing the blogs the other day, Diva and I ran across a post by Chea at Just a Betty Trying to be a Martha. She made the cutest ribbon decorated onesie. Immediately, Diva wanted to make one for both herself and her favorite AG doll.
The main problem for us was coming up with the basic "T" design for the shirt. If you are a fairly accomplished seamstress, their are plenty of patterns available. But for our purposes, we wanted something quick and easy.
Enter the pre-made newborn Onsie! We purchased a 5 pack of the newborn size (smallest ones available) for about $9.00 at Tarjay. Then we hit the dollar bins to find the ribbon. While we were there, we found a really cute pair of Christmas dollar socks and knew we would be trying to incorporate those in to our design, too.
Measuring from the shoulder down, we marked the at about the 6 inch mark.
We cut all the way through the four layers of material. Here you have your choice to finish off the edge. For this outfit, we just used a zig-zag stitch. Be careful not to accidentally sew the opening closed Not that I would know anything about that... If you are talented and have patience, a small hem could go in here. I think a serger would have been our best bet and I will do this in the future. A lettuce leaf ruffle edge would be really cute.
We then cut our ribbons in graduated lengths, each size increasing by 1/2 an inch. We used Fray Check to seal the edges, but clear nail polish would work, too. We secured the ribbons by starting with the top and centering the ribbon and working our way down. We varied the stitch with each ribbon, sometimes using zig zag, sometimes a straight stitch down the center, others all the way around.
So what to do with the socks?
We knew we wanted to make a pair of leggings out of them. Although I had seen several tutorials on line for making baby leggings out of adult socks (including one on Chea's site), they involved too many steps as far as I was concerned. We wanted quick and dirty. So this is what we did (sorry I didn't take pictures while we were doing it, this was a wing it type project and we weren't sure it was going to work. Sorry about the pics of the nasty, raggedy edges, too- this was a rough draft for us and I didn't want to drag the big serger out if I wasn't sure the project was going to work...
1. Take your pair of socks and turn them inside out.
2. Cut out the toe area, leaving about an inch and a half between where you cut and the heel of the sock.
3. Cut a straight slit from the toe all the way through the heel.
4. Turn the socks so that the heels touch and the legs hang down. The former cuffs of the sock will now make up your leg openings. Pin and stitch the area you cut out of the bottom of the feet together, all the way from from to back in one continuous seam.
5. The area you cut out of your toes is now the waist band. Fold down approximately 1/2 an inch and stitch a casing all the way around, leaving an opening for elastic.
6. Measure your elastic, then run it through the casing with a safety pin. For this doll we cut 10 inches of 3/8 inch elastic banding. Stitch edges of elastic together to complete the loop.
Turn the pants back right side out. Ta da.
Pat yourself on the back for creating an AG outfit for less than $3.00. Stand back and wait for your daughter to start telling you that she now needs a set for each of her dolls in various colors.
Sigh and wish you had thought to buy more ribbon and socks from the dollar bins...
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