So I needed to come up with a way to organize and store all of the clothing since that is what she has the most of. She has trouble hanging up her own outfits so I didn't think she'd want to hang up her doll clothing either. The idea of a storing the clothing in a wardrobe (which we don't have the room for), or from a little tension rod in her closet or between her dresser and wall, was out. If your girl doesn't mind hanging up clothes and you have the room for it, this is one storage solution. You can find out more about this Ikea Expedit bookshelf turned American Girl display HERE.
Most outfits come with tights, shoes, hats, purses, and other little things that would have been hard to hang up on hangers anyway. The above scenario has them in drawers, but like I said, we don't have the room for that so I needed to find a smaller solution. After laying out all her outfits and discovering that she has over 20 outfits for her 3 dolls! I decided we need to store them compactly.
Storage drawers weren't going to work out either. Like I said, each outfit comes with several accessories and they'd get lost in a drawer. So I decided to put each outfit in a 1 gallon zip lock bag and file them in a 12x12 size bin we already had. I got the idea from Pink and Green Mama HERE. I liked how she was able to fit two outfits per bag by putting a piece of paper in between. I used pink card stock and instead of cutting it to fit, I just folded the bottom 1" of paper.
This bag holds two different ballerina outfits, complete with tights, headbands, skirt and shoes.
And here are all the outfits neatly filed away. We did use one bag for random accessories that didn't really go with any particular outfit such as a backpack and extra hairbands.
And the dolls just love it. All the outfits are organized in one place and it's easy to see their wardrobe choices.
This is a great doll clothing storage solution especially if you don't have room for an additional piece of furniture. I love it when I find an organization solution that works.
