Every girl mom has likely gotten the “I need another dress for my doll” request at least once. With LOL dolls, the question might be “Can I have real clothes for my [insert doll’s name] instead of these plastic ones?” There should be an easy “YES!” answer to these requests. If you have sewing scraps or have a bunch of old clothes your girl outgrew, you are in luck! All we need for a nice, “real” LOL doll dress is a simple set of several stretch fabric cuts (I used cotton knit leftovers from my sewing), a LOL doll, a plastic cup or a lid (e.g. the one from NUTELLA), and scissors.
1. The first step in dressmaking is to draw the circle around your lid or plastic cup. Then cut this circle with your scissors.
2. The circle you get is almost as big as your doll. This is right. The dress will be nice and “princessy”. Fold the fabric circle in quarters.
3. Cut out the angle just a little bit. This will be a hole for the doll’s neck to be inserted. Yes, you will have to take the doll’s head off the body to put on the dress. But when did it stop a girl from playing with a doll?
4. In order to get the holes for the arms you need to fold the circle in two and draw two tiny half circles to the right and to the left from the central one and then cut them out.
5. The dress is almost done! Put it on a doll. You can leave it as is or add more charm to it!
6. Cut a long and narrow piece of fabric of another color. Wrap it around your doll’s waist and make a bow. Now it’s done! You can play with fabrics of different colors and textures. The only rule is… to have fun (and for the fabric to be stretchy)!
Mariia Gushchina is an immigrant from Russia and a mom of two who is surviving the 1.5-year+ pandemic with remote school and 24/7 fun of parenting. During this time she rediscovered meditational goodness and practical application of sewing. She founded Mom’s Angel as a result of a long search for versatile and bright yet kind to skin cotton baby clothes. Mariia can’t bear the idea of throwing the fabric remains away and thus she uses them for doll clothing! It’s a win-win when her daughter gets a new doll’s wardrobe and the planet gets less garbage.
