DIY Toy Horse Bridle and Reins

We were given some horses recently, the kind that fit with the 18" American Girl Dolls.  My 7 and 3 year olds have loved playing with them and are now wanting to ride a real horse.  My 3 year old son, especially wants to ride a horse since he's the only one of the kids who hasn't done that yet.  Well, there was that one time over the summer at a local petting zoo when he sat on a horse then cried and wanted to get off because the kid in front of him got bucked off.  Luckily that didn't prevent him wanting to ride a horse again.  

Enough horse riding talk, back to my DIY.  Recently my son has been wanting to ride a horse with reins. Maybe it's all the pictures of Santa in his sleigh holding onto the reindeer reins, but my son asks everyday to ride a horse with reins.  So I thought maybe for Christmas I'd get his toy horse a set of reins.  Well, I could for about $20, or I could DIY them myself and he could play with them right away.  

A quick Pinterest search yielded only one result.  Really, is there only one person who has figured this out and shared it?  Luckily one was all it took.  I was able to follow her step by step directions and make a bridle and reins for our toy horses.  HERE is the link to the step by step directions I used to make this bridle and reins.  Jessica from American Girl Fan does a great job of spelling out each step with pictures and I had no trouble following along.  It took maybe 10 minutes to make one and my kids love them.

Luckily I had all the supplies on hand:
Scissors
Tape measure or ruler
parachute cord (I had some from THIS paracord bracelet making kit)
duct tape

My son chose green paracord and black duct tape, and my daughter chose pink paracord and flowered duct tape.  I love the bright colors and how we could customize them to be much cooler than a plain old brown store bought bridle.  I made the reins about twice as long as suggested in the tutorial because my kids wanted to ride the horse, but if it's for the dolls, they don't need to be that long.

Looks like he loves it.

 And here's my daughter's horse modeling her new bridle.

Of course my daughter couldn't wait to try it out.  Yeehaw!!

It's not too late to make these in time for Christmas.  

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Organizing American Girl Doll Clothes

My 9 year old loves American Girl Dolls and all their accessories.   She knows the AG brand is expensive and doesn't limit herself to only those products.  Most, if not all of the products are made for 18" dolls so they are interchangeable.  She has Our Generation (the Target brand), Journey Girls (Toys R Us brand) and My Life (WalMart brand) stuff as well.  Needless to say, she has accumulated a lot of stuff, particularly clothing for these dolls.  It didn't help that we had an American Girl Doll birthday party for her last month either.

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.

American Girl Birthday Party

September was a busy month.  It felt like one party after another.  The Babes turned 3 and we had a Ladybug Picnic party for her and a few of her friends.   I attended a Vintage Themed Bridal Shower for my sister.  Then it was Sweetie Pie's turn.  For her 9th birthday she requested an American Girl Doll Party.

The first thing I did was go to Pinterest and draw inspiration from here, here and here.  We decided to decorate in pink and red and go with a star theme.