Rag Doll Summer Dress

Many years ago one of my wonderful donors from Crochetville added one of these rag dolls fully dressed with additional outfits for that year's donation and I fell in love with the doll.

I found the dolls could be purchased at Factory Direct Crafts and it began a journey to adapt patterns to fit the Rag Doll as no patterns were designed for this specific doll. She falls somewhere between most categories and sizes of dolls. She is a little small for most of the Cabbage Patch toddler clothes but most baby clothes aren't appropriate for her age. However, I have found some outfits from the baby dolls that do work.

The dress pattern come from a 1981 House of White Birches newsprint leaflet Baby Doll Fashions to Crochet by Margaret Funk. I used this previously to make 2 dresses for the 16 inch baby doll donation. It required a few additional adaptations for the Rag doll.

Notes:

I failed to look up last year's notes so I'm adding this note to remind myself for next year. I added and additional row to the top to provide a little more top for the rag doll as the doll is a different size than the baby dolls. I'm not sure with the trim and decreasing around the arm holes the is an issue on this year's model but I leave the information for my future self.

The dog had a go at my pattern book and thankfully this pattern is still whole, but if any of you see a copy feel free to leave a message in the comments as to where it can be purchased as I'm looking for a backup. It's old but really important for these donations.

This outfit was made with Lion Brand Ice Cream Yarn Tutti Frutti. This was a great chance to continue my quest to work on using up left over yarn from older projects. This ball has a long way to go but each project makes a dent.

As with the 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.

With this project complete the Rag doll now has her first item in her donation bag. I'm trying to commit to the idea of balancing my projects to keep the donations some what even.