The PDF pattern market has positively exploded with offerings over the last few years, which means makers are spoiled for choice. Four designers have joined forces to put together collections of patterns to form a complete wardrobe and more. Winter Wonderland, the third collection from this group of designers, Pattern Anthology, offers eight patterns to take your child through the winter weather and holiday season up to size 8. I’ll show you a little about the dress I chose to make for my girl, and provide a simple scarf tutorial to make Winter not so terribly chilly for your little one (or yourself!)

As you may have noticed, Ella grew out of size 8 many moons ago, but I was able to very easily enlarge the pattern for The Amaryllis Dress to fit and delight her. She mostly needs width in the belly, so I simply added a couple inches overall to the sides of the bodice and skirt, and raised the armhole a bit so she could wear the dress without a blouse underneath. She chose this dragon print fabric a couple years ago, but I never got around to finding a dress twirly enough for her to want to wear. Fortunately for me, I found the Amaryllis Dress. With a gathered front skirt, and a full circle, wrap back skirt, all is well in the world of twirl:

All this talk of Winter has me in the mood for a scarf. If you have a 7(ish) year old, you know that scarves (and gloves and hats) find a way of hiding at school, or at friends’ houses, or underneath car seats. For that reason, Ella needs a scarf that stays put, but isn’t too tight, and doesn’t require wrapping, tying, or otherwise inconvenient fastening. She also refuses to wear anything that feels constricting in any way, but hates to be cold. (Picky kid = design challenge!)

Grab a couple large scraps of knit fabric, and follow the few steps below to make a scarf they’ll want to wear, they can put on and take off themselves, and that stays in place over or under a coat: