practice.

sooooo.... as I was saying. I want to sew my own clothes out of old tshirts. Before I can jump into making clothes for myself, I have a couple of must dos.
First, I must hone my sewing skills. I'm lucky that I have a pretty strong foundation of sewing experience to call on. It's just that it's been more than a few years since I've sewn a scrap of clothing. Therefore I may procrastinate by sewing my boys some clothes. For sure, their figures are more forgiving.



My first practice project was to turn a tshirt into a pair of pants for E. Using a super cute (but impractical !bellbottoms!) kids pants pattern that I picked up at the double V ages ago, I compared the crotch seams to his most favourite pair of comfy pants. Then I noticed that there weren't any side seams on the comfy pants and of course I wanted to figure that out. So I measured at the hips and at the ankles and lined up the pattern pieces and traced the waistline, crotch and side seams to the notches. From there I chose the overall pant length, keeping in mind a cuff, and tapered the sides to match the ankle width.

It's so cool that this is a single pattern piece - and what is neat is that you can get a whole logo without cutting it. I just laid out the tshirt, covered the logo, and cut through both thicknesses. Maybe most kids' pants are made this way, but I've paid no attention.

The bottom fits a lot better than it looks in the picture. And I like the way the logo shows up on the hip, off center. While I was working on this, the gold medal hockey game was on and I admit I felt conflicted while making these pants :)
yay canada!