16 Inch Baby Doll Summer Dress

Every year I promise myself I will get to patterns I've bought but never used. Some are modern and some are long out of print treasures I've found from various pattern hunts.

The dress and hat for this outfit come from a 1981 House of White Birches newsprint leaflet Baby Doll Fashions to Crochet by Margaret Funk. The booklet has a nice table of contents that outlines what patterns are available for what size dolls. I've long realized this is just a suggestion as a 16 inch baby doll is not always the same depending on how it is designed but its a good starting point.

I used the Summer Dress pattern designed for the 16 inch doll and adapted the hat pattern for a 13 inch doll also found in the leaflet for this outfit.

Notes:

This outfit was made with Lion Brand Ice Cream Yarn Meringue.

To get this to fit the JC 16 Inch Baby Doll I started with an E hook and repeated row 5 once. Thus rows 3-6 follow the original directions for 3-5 moving each row directions down one. For the original row 6 now row 7 that starts the skirt I moved to a D hook to decrease the skirt size as it was too large with the e hook.

I started the directions for the 13 inch Baby Doll Bell hat and increased the rows prior to creating the brim to account for the larger 16 inch baby doll head.

Some of you may recognize my go to shoe pattern. The shoes are part of a free pattern called Peachy Keen found here. I used an I hook and a ball of worsted weight yellow yarn I found in my bag of left over yarn from previous projects. I'm trying to attack this pile of yarn when ever I get the chance before starting on new skeins of yarn.

This pattern is going to be on my go to list for donation patterns. I will hopefully be making another one for the second donation doll prior to November. It's a quick set but it looks quite nice.

There are several other patterns in this booklet I hope to try out to see how they will work for the various baby dolls.