Easy American Girl Doll Sweater Knitting Pattern

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Gwen is hands-down my favorite American Girl Doll Sweater Knitting Pattern! Not only is this 18 inch doll sweater gorgeous, but it’s way easier than it looks: no fancy colorwork knitting skills needed.  Each row is knitted with one strand of yarn at a time and the pattern is accomplished by slipping stitches.  I’ve knitting this pattern before in solid colors, but this time I decided to amp up the color a notch by using a solid yarn for the main color and a variegated yarn for the contrasting color: what do you think?

How Much Yarn Does it Use?

The best part about this project is that I made it out of leftover sock yarn! (So, if you like this color combo, you’ll like my Tic Tac Toes socks too.)  To give you a ballpark of how much yarn you’ll need: this sweater used about 88 yards of black and 42 yards of the colored yarn.  If you don’t have leftover yarn kicking around, I bet you could knit two sweaters out of two balls of Knit Picks Stroll – just swap it so you use the main color from the first one as the contrasting color for the second one.  I’ve also made this out of Palette, which is fun because they have every color under the sun, but that’s 100% wool, so you’ll have to wash it with care.  (Whereas, this sweater knitted out of Stroll can just be thrown in the wash if kids with sticky hands are playing with it).

How Do You Knit It?

The pattern designer has you knit this on DPNs, but I worked it on size 2 circular needles (2.75mm) with the magic-loop technique.   It’s knitted in one piece from the bottom up and the “hardest” part of the pattern is when you need to make the arm holes.  It’s actually quite easy – you just have to follow the directions.  The “hard” part is that it feels a little counter-intuitive and you just have to take a little leap of faith and follow the pattern.

Here are some more details about this project.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed knitting it!

yarn details

Knit Picks Stroll Hand Painted in Cartoons
Fingering Weight
75% Wool 25% Nylon
100 g/ 462 yd skein
Purchased in 2013

Black fingering weight yarn without label (probably Brown Sheep Nature Spun?)

project details

pattern: “Gwen” by Steph Wiley (buy on etsy or as a Ravelry download)
needles: US size 2 (2.75 mm), nickel-plated fixed circular needles
yarn used: 88 yards of the black yarn and 42 yards of the colored yarn
duration: December 27, 2021 – March 26, 2022 (long breaks in between working sessions!)