Weekly Wardrobe

New Pajamas!

As with most of my daughter's clothes recently, she's outgrown her warm weather pajamas, too! After a quick search of my fabric and pattern collection, I came up with the two sets shown above. I made these last week in between finishing school and all the events I had to attend. Thankfully, all the pieces were easy and I could work with the small amounts of time I had.

The yellow set and the blue shorts are all cotton wovens, the striped top is a knit. For both sets, the shorts came from McCall's 4651. The shorts are your basic elastic waist shorts with just two pattern pieces. The yellow top came from Simplicity 4208. I was looking for something easy, cute and that took little fabric. This top took me less than two hours to make, from cutting the pattern pieces out of the tissue to hemming the top. It also has a casing with elastic across the top of the back, which helps with the fit. The striped top is the long tank top from Jalie 2564.

I didn't quite have enough fabric for either of the tops, so I made a few pattern changes. The yellow top has seams at center front and back due to the small narrow pieces of fabric I had. Because of the gathers and print, these are not very noticeable. I had to do a bit more piecing for the striped top as you can see from the picture of the back, below. I didn't have a piece long enough to cut the entire back, so I did some creative piecing.

I also had to do some creative piecing for the self binding and straps. For the most part the straps are cut on the bias, but one section had to be cut crosswise. It bothers me a little, but these are pajamas which will never, ever be worn out of the house. Besides, the binding also gave me a chance to try out the binding attachments for my coverstitch machine. The stitching isn't perfect, but it was a great learning experience and the garment is still wearable. By the way, if you're looking for some excellent coverstitch tutorials, look no further than Debbie Cook's tutorials!

I think we are happy with both sets. I used patterns and fabrics I already had, plus got to work with the coverstitch machine. She has new pajamas, and told me she likes the blue set best.

Thank you all for the compliments on the Daily Window project! I have one more of these to do before the end of the week. I continued to quilt pieces for REC today, assembled my coat muslin without sleeves for the first fitting and made some shorts for my son out of a pair of pants that were too short. Tomorrow I'll show you the first fitting of the coat muslin.

Parting Shot: Red Shoes. These are my latest pair of tennis shoes. I love red, and when I saw these Keens (model: Ventura II, color: tomato red), I knew that I'd buy them eventually. I got these last week, and I really like them. They were a bright spot in a tough week!