Snazzy new clothes for Dinosaur

I went to a resale shop recently, looking for preemie boy clothes to make Emily's roughly 13" newborn Cabbage Patch doll named Dinosaur (it was mine, and the new ones are a totally different size, so it's not like I can just go out and grab an outfit from Walmart!) I saw a tutorial on youtube about how to convert baby clothes into doll clothing and thought it was awesome! I made an outfit for Emily's 18" (not American Girl) doll named Zoe out of newborn clothes, and they turned out pretty well (I also made Zoe a pair of pajamas from the American Girl Molly pattern set I found for free online, so now she has 2 outfits and a pair of pajamas!) The resale shop wanted $10 an outfit for preemie clothes, and that just wasn't good enough of a deal to turn my head. We ended up going to an outlet mall yesterday and I looked in Carters at their clearance stuff. They had the cutest dinosaur themed preemie outfit set (2 onesies, pajamas, pants, and a bib... honestly, a bib for a preemie? WTF?) for $8.

Anyway, I got to work last night, resizing it. It was a challenging one, the sleeves had those fold over things (to protect baby's face), and I wanted to preserve the function of them, so I had to shorten the sleeves from the shoulder, without shortening the neckline. I made a couple mistakes that *I* know are there, but Emily does not. I cut the bottom off the onesie, hemmed the neckline, and it wasn't the hardest part. The hardest were the pants! They have these cute little dinosaur footies, and I didn't want to just cut those off. I thinned the legs out, and tried to shorten from the waist down, but the fabric was pulling and I didn't want to completely scrap the elastic that came with the pants, so I decided that Dinosaur could just pull his pants up really high like a grandpa. Emily's cool with that. Here are some pics:





I still need to work on the other onesie (cute dino print), pajamas (same dino print as the other onesie), but right now Emily is content with what he has on.

Here's a pic of the outfit I made for Zoe:



Baby clothes are a great way to make inexpensive clothing for dolls that are hard to find clothing for, or financially prohibitive. American Girl doll clothing is expensive, unless bought secondhand. Here's a link to the American Girl doll clothing patterns I mentioned before. The patterns are a little small according to sites I've seen, so add a seam allowance, and the instructions aren't the most complete, but you'll figure it out!

http://agplaythings.com//AG%20Patterns/DollDressPatterns.html

I love that they have period specific ones, especially Kirsten now that she's been retired!