Barnes & Nobles American Girl Demo

The costume I'm wearing represents the 1896 time frame, near the Gibson Girl era.  As you can see on my earliest entry, I mention this outfit and the event that it was made for. 

At the barnes & Nobles event, I dressed up my 5 dolls in different outfits.  This is my most favorite, the Medieval Traveling outfit.  You can see additional pictures of this outfit under the American girl doll label.

This outfit for the doll was inspired, Ohh, do you see the similarity?....it was inspired by my outfit.  My doll is also wearing a Gibson Girl outfit made with the same fabric as mine.  I'll post her outfit next time so that you might see the details a little bit better.  Since I just finished her outfit that morning, I wasn't able to include a not made up hat and fan. You can see the other dolls behind me, from left to right - Elizabethean outfit (my creation), Tinkerbell, Felicity's day dress [worn by Elizabeth] with matching purse [the object of the demo]

Here I am showing my audience how to make the stitches in the fabric

and helping them out with any questions,

The girls loved to ask questions.  We talked about the time period of these outfits, colors and fabrics, designing and the process of putting it all together.

It was a lot of work putting all this together, but, I must say, I truly enjoyed this short time interacting with them, the interest and the wanting to learn, and especially, the end result:  "I really did do this all by myself!". 

I want to give thanks to Anna, the Barnes & Noble children supervisor at the Silverdale Mall, for helping and especially for providing a fun program for the American Girl Club throughtout the year.

Barnes & Nobles American Girl Demo

I started with 3x8 inches of cotton fabric,

made channels at either ends with the sewing machine.  Then I had the little girls sew the side edges with yarn and a blunt end large needle.  I was amazed that a young girl of 4 was able to do quite a good job.  I cut twenty five of these for the girls to sew by themselves.  then I went to extra mile........

I cut an additonal  25 of these and sewed them up, placed som decorations on the front, as seen on both of these.  then I proceeded to insert narrow satin ribbon, as can be seen on the left side of the top picture.....

The finished product.  I gave each of the girls one of these to take home as a job well done.  They were quite excited about them.  and they all chose the same fabric purse as the one they had been working on.  I had an hour for the demonstration.