My daughter loves her little lego figures (these are technically lego "minidolls," but they're made by lego and compatible with lego bricks). She now has every single lego princess, and all of them need ball gowns!
I've found a quick and easy way to make durable little lego dresses, and it requires extremely minimal sewing skills. You can make these with any type of fabric and thread, so it's a good use for fabric scraps. I have found that the easiest material to work with is felt. I like the wool felt because it's natural, but any felt will work.
This method should also work for making dresses for traditional lego minifigures, but you'll probably want to tweak the pattern a bit (a bit smaller circle, with a slightly larger, oval-shaped hole for the legs.)
Step 1: Find a medicine jar lid.
It should be about 2.5 inches in diameter.
Most medicine/vitamin lids seem to be about this size.
Step 2: Trace it onto fabric of the desired hue.
If you use white felt, you can actually give it to the kids to color with permanent or washable markers. This makes a fun way for them to easily customize their dresses!
Trace the medicine lid onto the felt. You might want a white colored pencil or chalk for darker colors. But I found even on this dark red that graphite showed up.
Step 3: Sew a running stitch
Sew a simple running stitch all the the way around the circumference of the circle. (If you aren't using felt, you'll want to either hem or blanket stitch around the circumference before doing the running stitch)
Running stitch is the easiest stitch. You can even bunch a bunch of stitches on a needle like this for faster stitching, but it's not necessary.
Sew all the way around the circle
Step 4: Pull the thread! Pull the thread until you get kind of a mushroom shape. Then tie a knot or two to make sure it doesn't unravel.
Pull the thread until it is as poofy as you want it. Then tie a knot or two!
Step 5: Cut a small hole in the center of the dress.
I like to fold the dress into quarters and then snip the tip. If you're making this for a traditional lego minifigure, you'll probably want to cut an oval, rather than a little hole.
Fold the cloth and snip the tip to get a hole in the top.
Step 6: Put it on the doll!
Take off the torso
Put the legs' peg into the dress hole
Put the torso back on!
Make as many skirts as desired!
To customize them even futher, you can embroider or applique designs, sew inserts of other fabrics, color with markers, sew on beads, whatever your creativity inspires!
Nicole, thanks for sharing. Not having any kids I didn't even know there were lego dolls.
Using felt to make the skirts is a really great idea and you make this look so easy.
I bet I can guess which skirt your daughter likes best. I bet it is green. Though that one looks like it required a little more effort with the sewing.
Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't work. Stephen Herrod Buhner
I just asked her what her favorite is, and she said, "All of them!" She can't decide!
The reason the green one is so elaborate is because I was trying to make her a Tiana doll. They haven't released a Tiana lego in many years, and so the doll alone is a good $25+ on the secondary market. So I tried to cobble one together from the pieces I could find. To make her look like Tiana, I actually hand dyed the cloth to make it more of the green, and embroidered on the white lily. It was totally worth it to see her face on Christmas morning when she got her own Tiana!
Princess Tiana
Two days ago, she decided that she needed a Princess Peach (from Mario) and a Princess Zelda (from the video game) so we used her left over pieces to make the princesses. But, to make them look like themselves, I made them fancy skirts! (Princess Peach is usually in pink, but we didn't have a pink shirt piece, so this Peach is blue...)
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All the princesses, with their new friends Peach and Zelda in the front (in blue and purple)
I saw a cool video showing how to use a hole punch in paper to make accessories and paper pieces for Legos. You could do similar (less study) skirts with folded paper.
We actually started out using paper, and it was a lot of fun for the kids to design and cut it out. But, the paper wasn't very durable and tended to rip and fall apart easily. The creases weren't that easy to make look good, and tended to uncrease.
This was actually the tutorial that we first used:
The paper hole punch idea is great idea for making nice, clean holes just the right size. We cut our holes by hand, and they didn't always fit quite right!
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