American Girl Doll Refashion

For this week's 49-cent Friday refashion over on the Diary of a MadMama blog, I started out with this top I purchased a while ago.

Aeropostale cable-knit sweater

I decided to refashion this into an outfit for my daughter's American Girl doll.

I cut off one of the sleeves and using the cuff as the new waistband of the skirt, all I had to do was hem the raw edge. 

Pretty easy, don't 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 pulled the other sleeve up to the doll's waist to measure where I needed to cut (cuff side up).

Snippety snip!

With the sleeve inside out, sew 2 seams up the length of the sleeve where the inside of the legs will be. Then sew the bottom (raw edge) for the toe seams, and then a small section where the crotch of the tights will be.

See?

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 simply put the sweater on my daughter to see where I needed to take it in. 

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).

If you would like to see the more detailed tutorial of this refashion, you can check out this post.

Have a great weekend everyone!

~Jen