Make a LEGO Friends outfit for your LEGO-loving girl. A perfect gift for tweens or any girl who loves to build with LEGO Friend sets.
My daughters are master builders. They love creating with Legos, especially with their dad. So a few years ago, when Lego came out with Lego Friends, my girls were ecstatic. The building sets were things they wanted to build (pet hospital, beauty parlor, restaurant) in colors they loved. Lots of pink, purple, and turquoise. Especially turquoise. They still use plenty of regular Lego bricks, but there are lots of Lego Friends pieces, people, and animals sprinkled everywhere.
The Lego Friends have 5 main characters: Mia, Stephanie, Olivia, Emma, and Andrea. Both of my daughters have a favorite character, so I decided to make them outfits to match their favorite characters’ outfits. Mia is the animal lover of the Friends so she has a paw print and butterflies on her shirt.
Olivia is a scientist and has pink and purple hearts on her shirt and a purple skirt.
Lego Friends Outfits
The outfits I made are partly handmade and partly store-bought, although you could sew everything or buy everything instead.
The Lego Friends figures all wear tank tops, probably to save on manufacturing costs. However, I like my daughters to have sleeves on their shirts so I used t-shirts. I don’t sew a t-shirt because they are cheaper to buy than to make. I bought a turquoise shirt for Mia’s outfit and a pink shirt for Olivia’s. I found shirts with cute lace detail on the shoulders and hem, but in hindsight, I wish I had bought better quality t-shirts. These have started to peel. After all the work of making the outfits, I wanted them to last longer.
The bottoms are handmade so I could get them just right. I sewed a purple circle skirt for the Olivia outfit. I simply cut a circle out of purple knit fabric, cut a small circle in the center, and added a waistband.
I made the green capris for Mia’s outfit from a Simplicity pattern. I made them out of woven fabric, but they could also be made like sweatpants.
Making Lego Friends T-shirt Appliqués
To make the appliqué shapes for the shirts, I took pictures of the dolls and brought those pictures into Adobe Illustrator to trace the shapes on the dolls’ shirts. Once I had the shapes ready, I enlarged them to fit on a girl’s t-shirt and printed the pattern out. You can download a pdf of the pattern for Mia’s shirt here and Olivia’s shirt here.
There are many ways to make appliqués. One of the easiest ways I’ve found it to use felt. Felt doesn’t fray and it doesn’t need to have a backing. It’s already stiff, but it stretches enough to move with t-shirt fabric.
First, I traced the shapes onto the felt using a felt tip pen. Fabric chalk would have worked better because I had to make sure I trimmed all of the black ink off when I cut out the pieces.
I cut out the larger shapes first—the paw print and the butterflies—and cut those out of purple felt. Then I cut down the pattern pieces to the center of the paw print and the smaller butterflies and cut them out of pink felt. If I had been completely accurate, the smaller butterflies should have been darker pink.
I used the paper from the pattern to place the felt pieces on the shirt in the correct place. Those small paw pieces all look the same, but they’re not. Straight pins hold the felt onto the shirt. Just make sure you don’t pin through the back of the shirt!
To attach the felt appliqué to the shirt, I sewed it on with embroidery floss using a back-stitch. If you’re not sure how to back-stitch, here’s a good video. Back stitching lets the shirt stretch and move without breaking the thread. My stitches are a little different than the video because I left spaces between each stitch. Sewing the felt pieces on isn’t hard, it just takes a little time. I usually watched tv while stitching. Threading the needle with embroidery floss was the hardest part.
I used the same small butterfly pattern to make appliqués on the pants with dark pink felt.
I followed the same process to make the shirt appliqués for Olivia’s shirt too. 
My Lego Friends
The outfits turned out really cute. My daughters have worn them for everyday clothes to school and as costumes. They’ve worn them a couple of times to some Lego builds too.
Here’s the free printable of the patterns for Mia’s shirt and Olivia’s shirt again. Making Lego Friends outfits was a great way to make a DIY gift for my two Lego-loving girls.