The Katie Dress Pattern October 7, 2010 – Posted in: Pattern, Sewing, Tutorials

My oldest niece turned 7 in August and decided that for her birthday she wanted an American Girl doll. I wanted to help celebrate her great new doll and thought clothes would be the perfect gift. What does a girl love more than clothes? Well, after looking around at the price of American Girl doll clothes, I decided to make my own.

An Internet search for patterns left me empty handed. Nearly everything I found was for knit or crochet and I don’t do either. So I bought my own AG knock-off doll, got out a tape measure and some paper and got to work. Before I knew it I was sewing dress after dress! I have a gazillion more ideas for clothes and I can’t wait to turn them into patterns to share!

So to honor my sweet niece, I named my first dress pattern after her. This is The Katie Dress!

As a kid, I hated that my doll clothes closed with velcro. After a few weeks they were always gunked up with cat hair, doll hair, fuzz, and whatever else found its way to the velcro. So I wanted to create clothes that had real world methods of closure. So, The Katie Dress has a zipper back!

And sweet rick rack details.

Or, if you prefer, piping!


These dresses are amazingly simple to construct. Each one took me about an hour and used leftover scraps of fabric! I hope you’ll enjoy making them as much as I do!

To print the pattern pieces correctly, set your margins to 0 and print. There is a 1″ by 1″ square on each piece to verify your pages printed at the correct size for an 18″ doll.

CLICK HERE to download the free pattern!