Pirate Night, American Girl Style

When we discovered our Disney Cruise had a Pirate Night, it was quickly clear the doll chosen to cruise with us would need pirate gear. We had an afternoon and the things we had on hand to come up with something that would work. We did some searching through the clothes we already had and came up with Felicity's riding coat and hat, a pair of black pants I made (which were pulled up to look like breeches), Cecile's boots and Felicity's white stockings. What else would we need? A sword, a hook and an eye patch, course.  Here is Cecile modeling the pirate gear before we left:

 

For the sword, Gabby drew a picture to make a pattern. We cut two of the pattern from a Pop Tart box. Pretty quickly we realized we needed something more stable to help it out so we added a small popsicle stick in the middle with one end down in to the handle, seen below.

 With a more stable sword, we covered the blade in shiny silver duct tape. Then the hilt was covered in black electrical tape. After we made the pic below, we added a pipe cleaner around the handle to make a handle Cecile could hold. You can see it in the pics with Cecile.

 On to the hook. What would fit over her hand? Ah! A medicine cup. We turned a medicine cup upide down and covered it in black electrical tape like so:

 Once covered, we poked a hole in it. This is was much harder than I anticipated and took quite a bit of time. We used a tiny screwdriver. There might be something better but that was what we had.

 Again we used a pipe cleaner to make a hook. We stuck it through the hole, making a knot on the inside and shaping a hook on the outside.

 The medicine cup fit fairly snugly on her hand and stayed well. Over use, it stretched a little but we didn't add any other way to keep it on her hand and managed to keep up with it all night on the cruise.

The final step was an eye patch. We used black felt and black 1/4 inch elastic. Again, Gabby drew a pattern, which we cut from the the felt. I sewed the elastic on to the patch. We did make sure her eye was closed when we put the patch on her.

Here is Cecile in all her pirate goodness on the Disney Wonder. Somewhere along the way we added the red belt to hold her sword when not in use. It is simply the selvedge edge I had cut off of some red fleece on a project past. Cecile was the best dressed pirate on the ship.