My Life Mermaid

I'm down to my last two posts for the projects for the 2023 donation. I'm actually in the process of sorting stuff and packing it as I write this up and prepost it. I have a delivery date and while it seems impossible it soon will be time to begin work on 2024's donations.

After starting on the Mary Maxim kit I was pretty sure I had another Mermaid pattern. Before I discovered Adoring Doll's 18 inch patterns, Sweet Silver Crochet patterns was one of the places I got many of my themed outfits for the dolls. Sure enough I had picked up her Mermaid pattern and never made it. I seemed 2023 was the year of the Mermaid. You can purchase her pattern here. Notes: I used Red Heart Super Saver Wild Flower and Turqa. Peacock would likely work for the tail as well. The suggested yarn is Crafter's Secret but I didn't have any and Red Heart worked for the project.

I did not record the hook size but I'm thinking I had to go up to an I to get the waist section of the tail to fit. It might have been an H for the fin.

This should become part of my princess rotation. I pulled the patterns late in the year but the thing about an on going project is nothing stops you from continuing it into the next year and I hope to add more princess dresses to next year's donation.

American Girl Ariel's Dinner With Eric

I've mentioned many times how much I love Sweet Silver Creations princess dresses. Shortly after finishing Cinderella's dress I began working on Ariel's dress. You can purchase this pattern here. The shoes are another Sweet Silver Creations pattern School Uniform available here.

As I mentioned with the Cinderella dress these princess patterns do use up a considerable amount of yarn. When my husband asks me why I keep needing to buy yarn when I have so much this is one of the reasons why. While I have a considerable amount of yarn, I end up using up the princess colors pretty quickly. I am working on a strategy to target some of the orphan yarns that have been neglected in favor of the yarns I finish off on these projects again and again.

American Girl Belle First Attempt

One of my goals every year is to downsize my yarn room by using up the yarn I have on hand to make as many of the donation doll clothes as I can. Some require unique or specific yarn I have to buy, but I'm always surprised at how many outfits I can make just using my stash on hand. The key is to make sure you do have the stash on hand before starting the project.

That was the story behind this dress. I thought I had multiple skeins of this blue when I started and while not the suggested color for the Belle pattern, found here, I liked it. The pattern was easy to follow and I thought I was starting to get my groove back when I went to search for the second ball of yarn. Much to my surprise what I thought was a matching skein turned out to be a slightly different shade of blue.

At that point I decided it still made a cute outfit and decided instead of abandoning it to finish it off and restart the Belle outfit again, this time making sure I had the two skeins I needed.