American Girl Side Blog 🐑

American girl dolls with their protest signs 🎀✨

Before and after of Maryellen wearing a crinoline. It really does wonders for her skirts, making them big and beautiful! A very authentic 1950s silhouette.

In her books, Maryellen borrows a crinoline from her older sister, so it's canon that she wears one. I happened to have some of this sheer fabric lying around, and of course American Girl retired the crinoline from her collection because they don't care anymore about these kinds of historical details, so I fixed that problem myself! It was really easy to make. Doesn't look much like the original, but it does the job perfectly.

I try my best to have all my historical characters in period-accurate undergarments. Obviously this is to give their clothes the right silhouette, but it also reminds me of how many excessive undergarments girls and women were once expected to wear. Through much of history, part of the purpose of those restrictive underclothes was to keep girls closely bound to home, preparing for a future no larger than the domestic sphere, not out having carefree adventures and exploring every corner of the world.

I feel very fortunate that I grew up in a time when I didn't have to be buckled and laced and buttoned and bound into layers and layers of heavy petticoats and stays and stockings and garters like girls in the past. Even Maryellen and real girls in the 1950s were required to wear skirts or dresses to school, never pants; my own mother even remembers skirts being required at her public school only a decade later! To me now, living in a part of the US where life is pretty laid-back and casual clothes are standard, wearing skirts five days a week at any age sounds absolutely exhausting. I would have been especially miserable had I been subject to that rule in school.

In fact, I don't think I ever wore a skirt to school more than once or twice. So I was able to grow up running, climbing, exploring, and getting dirty and disheveled without worrying about accidentally letting all of Williamsburg get a glimpse of my knees and be scandalized I'm while perched atop the roof picking the best apples from the top of the tree on apple butter day. For example.

I fully believe giving girls freedom from burdensome clothing in the past half century has done so very much in shaping the confident, curious, and liberated adults they later became, who fully participated in the world and didn't feel held back by restrictive clothing or oppressive expectations of traditional gendered behavior. And our world needs as many people like that as we can raise up.

The American girls :D

Redraw of an old piece from about a year ago

Kirsten took Sari in both hands and looked at her closely in the flickering light. Sari was just a rag doll with a faded face and a sun-bleached dress, but she was Kirsten’s very, very own. Kirsten pressed Sari to her cheek. 

It's a sunny spring day in Minnesota Territory, and Kirsten is stuck indoors, helping with the spring cleaning. Her first task is to sweep the upstairs bedrooms--she shares one with her three siblings, and so it gets messy very quickly. But Kirsten doesn't complain--she remembers her previous home, a one-room log cabin on her aunt and uncle's farm. That was easier to clean, but it was hard sharing such a small place with six people. After a fire burned that cabin down, the Larsons bought a much larger house, the beautiful home they dreamed they'd have when they left Sweden two years ago.

As for my part in this, I created a bedroom for my Kirsten doll a few years ago, but I recently renovated it to make it look more like the illustrations in Kirsten's sixth book, Changes for Kirsten.

The walls in this illustration look like they've been finished with plaster, which was common in houses at the time. The light color would have come from local sources of limestone.

So most of the changes I made were to the walls and windows. I used printed photographs for the windows, and added the twelve-pane window frames over the images before printing. For the walls, I took down the boring white wood paneling. I imitated that plastered look using tissue paper stuck to the first layer of pale yellow paint, and then I painted another layer over the tissue paper.

The furnishings are basically the same, except for the trunk on the right side of this photo. She used to store her clothes in the top half of Felicity's clothes press, which I mentioned in my recent post about moving the clothes press into the parlor for Caroline to use. After I did that, I knew Kirsten would need a place to store her clothes, and what better piece than a smaller version of her trunk?

Most of the things in the above picture are not from Kirsten's collection. The bed was made by my grandpa when I was eight and first got my Kirsten doll. My mom made the quilt on the bed and the one on the rocking chair, the pillow and mattress on the bed, and the two darker gray cats. The foot stove next to the bed is Pleasant Company, and so are the shoes (including snow shoes) lined up next to the trunk. The rocking chair came from an antique store. I made everything else: both rugs, the cradle, the nightstand, the candle and book and stuffed cat on the nightstand, the cross stitch hanging on the wall, the shelves and everything on them, the painted round boxes at the foot of the bed, baby Britta's dress, and Kirsten's quilt square in the embroidery hoop.

This is a little wooden trunk I found at a craft store. I painted it blue and then painted on the decorative designs using stencils.

That's Kirsten's straw hat hanging on the wall, from her collection. My mom made the two sunbonnets.

I gave it a weathered look by lightly brushing on white and red paint.

The trunk can hold all of Kirsten's clothes. It has room for a few more dresses too. I have almost all of Kirsten's clothes; I'm only missing her baking outfit, skating coat, and promise dress.

I also made the gingham curtains for the windows. There's a lot of blue and white going on in here, so I wanted them to match the color themes.

Next to Britta's cradle are the round boxes I made to hold Kirsten's socks and ribbons, which are all Pleasant Company things. Her lunch box and bucket are from craft stores.

I remade her honey crate and the jars of honey. They now contain clear glue dyed with food coloring. I made her little gnomes too.

The rocking chair was an antique store find. It's perfect for her to sit with her baby sister Britta.

I also painted a little flourish on the end of her bed.

I ran into Kirsten on her way to school this morning. She’s so excited to see signs of springtime in the world around her. Soon, school will be let out for the planting season.