December 31, 2018

Join Lee & Pearl as we get ready for American Girl® Girl of the Year™ Blaire Wilson!

If you are anywhere in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on January 1, 2019, please JOIN US as we welcome Blaire Wilson™ in person.

Both "Lee" and "Pearl" will be at the American Girl store at the Dallas Galleria on January 1, 2019 — and we'd love to meet you! We'll be on line outside the store from 9:15 AM CST. The store opens at 10:00 AM and the Girl of the Year festivities last until 1 PM.

We'll have Blaire-themed gifts on hand for anyone who comes up and says "hi" — so we'd love to get an estimated head count. Please let us know if you might be able to make it by sending us an email at info@leeandpearl.com.

NOTE: The American Girl store is in the parking lot of the Dallas Galleria, at 13464 Dallas Pkwy.

We were excited to get the latest American Girl catalog, featuring Blaire Wilson and her whole collection. Then when we saw the full-color, full-resolution pictures of Blaire in her meet dress, we were even more excited!

The American Girl designers and our pattern maker Pearl have clearly been following the same trends this season. Our latest FREE PATTERN for mailing list subscribers — Pattern 1038: The Gift Bow Front Dress for 18 Inch, 16 Inch and 14 1/2 Inch Dolls — has the same silhouette and remarkably similar bow front detail as Blaire's pretty white dress.

What a lucky coincidence! We quickly grabbed two of the Blaire-appropriate fabrics we recently purchased at JOANN — a light yellow cotton broadcloth and a soft white bee-printed flannel — and created our own homage to Blaire and her collection.

Though Blaire's bee-printed meet dress is all-white, with yellow accents only on the buttons and handkerchief around her wrist, we took advantage of the color-blocking potential of our Bow Front Dress to bring that yellow into the dress itself.

We also re-created Blaire's fabric flower hair ornament, using our Pattern 2064: Posh Accessories Fabric Flower Trim directions and pattern, scaled down to 75% for a smaller, daintier flower.

Then we gave our Blaire stand-in — our Truly Me™ #61 Joanna — farm appropriate pets from our collection: a Christmas ornament white duck, and a vintage Steiff lamb that Pearl received as a birthday gift when she was Blaire's age!

Finally, we fell completely in love with Blaire's "waterfall braid" hairstyle and had to re-create it ourselves on our #61.

This was Pearl's first attempt at the style, and it was so easy and looks so pretty that you may see it on lots of our doll models in the future!

If you are not already a member of our mailing list and would like to receive Pattern 1038: The Gift Bow Front Dress as our FREE GIFT to you, CLICK HERE to sign up.

If you would like to make your own fabric flower hair ornaments, CLICK HERE to check out Pattern 2064: Posh Accessories for 18 Inch Dolls in our Etsy store.

And if you'd like to try your hand at creating pretty waterfall braids, CLICK HERE to see the PopSugar tutorial that we followed.

Enjoy — and remember, if you're in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, we'd love to see you at the Blaire Wilson in-store debut tomorrow!

Stay tuned for future newsletters, as we try out different variations of Blaire's outfits and accessories, using Lee & Pearl patterns and more easy-to-sew fabrics from JOANN.

See you next week!

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