Holly’s Dolly Dresses: Debbie’s Dolly Dresses Quilt

At Market in October, the star of Holly Holderman’s LakeHouse Fabrics booth was her Dolly Dresses quilt on display. To showcase her upcoming Dolly Dresses 2 and Dolly Dresses 3 lines, she asked us to participate in this Dolly Dresses blog event. I love a challenge so we said YES!

We’re the first in Holly’s Doll Dresses blog series, and each day she’ll be posting the link to a different designer blog to show off their Dolly Dresses quilt. Each designer has used the LakeHouse Dolly Dresses 2 and Dolly Dresses 3 lines to create a completely unique doll dress quilt! And, Holly will have details on her blog on how you can win these Dolly Dresses panels too! We’re really excited to see everyone’s quilts and to show off ours!

I was inspired to create a quilt with Courthouse Steps Blocks with simple borders with prairie points as accents. Our quilt finishes at 74 1/2″ x 74 1/2″ and is the perfect size to display on my sewing room wall!

As a child I cut out paper dolls for hours on end, and when I was old enough, I started making clothes for my dolls so this was the perfect project for me. Each dress on the doll dress panel has its own personality with endless possibilities for embellishments. I gathered together lots and lots of rick rack! Then I gathered tiny buttons and a little extra ribbon to use as bows at the neckline! Holly designed the doll dress panels with swatches of fabric along the sides of each doll dress panel are that are just the perfect size for collars, cuffs, bias trims and button plackets.

I matched the threads to each dress (we have Mettler thread at the FQS now in all the perfect colors for this project!). And the designing began…cuffs here, collars there, buttons down the front and on the cuffs, bias border at the hemline topped off with rick rack…and on and on it went!

I’m sure you all will have so much fun with these panels! I even buttonhole-stitched around some of the jackets to make it look like they were appliquéd on (cheeky, I know)! All embellishments were sewn down securely so this quilt would be safe for little girls to play on.

Then came the Courthouse Steps Blocks in all those wonderful Lakehouse colors! I used scraps of old Lakehouse lines for my blocks so yours will not be identical, but Dolly Dresses 2 arrives in March and Dolly Dresses 3 in May, so sign up at that link to be notified when they get here!

We know some of you will be itching to make this quilt with Holly’s wonderful fabric, so we made a tutorial for my quilt for you to use when it arrives. You can use the Fat Quarter Bundles of these groups for your Courthouse Steps Blocks, but know that since I used older LakeHouse fabrics your blocks will vary from mine.

Click on the image below to download and print out our two-page Debbie’s Dolly Dresses Quilt tutorial PDF, and happy quilting!

~ Debbie Taylor

Debbie’s Dolly Dresses Tutorial PDF