I made some garments! Admittedly, quite simple ones, but I did try some new patterns which was fun. Ever since my daughter spotted a fabric that I had used to make a pair of pyjama pants for myself she has been bugging me to make her a pair too. With the weather warming up she has recently transitioned from sleeping in an insulated onesie to real pyjamas so she could actually use another pair.

There wasn’t enough left of that particular fabric though, so I had a look in my stash for something else that she liked. I still had plenty left of a Robert Kaufman Laguna jersey with an Ann Kelle print. It might look familiar to some of you because I also used it for one of the maternity t-shirts that I wore during both my pregnancies. It feels very soft so I think it will make a comfortable pair of pyjamas too.

No, I did not even attempt to do any pattern matching here.

I chose the sleeping johns pattern from Meg McElwee’s book “Growing up sew liberated” and decided to just try making them with my daughter present in the room. While tracing the pattern I warned her that if she made the tracing paper shift she’d get wonky leggings and she understood that this was something that we wanted to avoid. It is a very simple and quick pattern to make with only one pattern piece. We actually managed to pick a pattern and fabric, trace the pattern, cut the fabric, adjust my overlocker (someone had put several of the tension dials to 1 so I was extremely glad I had done a practice swatch before starting on the real thing!) and assemble the leggings except for hemming during a single nap of my youngest daughter.

She also found this owl ribbon I had used previously in a pair of trousers I had made her and wanted me to use it for this pair as well.

I made the leggings as instructed except for how the elastic was put in. The instructions tell you to fold the waistband down to create a casing and then to put the elastic in between the fold. The elastic and casing are then topstitched at the same time. I prefer to first overlock the elastic to the top edge of the legging and then folding the whole thing to the inside to stitch in place. I think my method is easier to get right because the elastic is already tamed.

The book suggests combining the sleeping johns with the crossover tee to create a set and since I still had more than enough fabric left I decided to do just that. I even found a good matching ribbing in my stash and now sort of wish I had finished the hem of the pants with ribbing as well to get an even more matching look. The t-shirt is also easy to assemble although I did scratch my head a bit at the edgestitching of the neckline ribbing until I realized that the overlap is actually stitched closed during this step. I also first sewed both sideseams and then attached the ribbing to the bottom instead of sewing one side seam and then attaching the ribbing before sewing the other side seam.

The size chart in the book put my daughter in 3T, the garments turned out a bit larger than the Dutch size 104 my daughter now wears. I don’t have any size 110 yet to compare it to but I think the 3T is closer to that than to 104. She’ll be able to use this set for a good while.

And if you thought that just because I had made sure the overlock stitches looked good before starting on the legging I could simply start sewing the t-shirt a couple of days later, think again. This time someone had found the differential feed and stitch length dials. And no, I did not even attempt to unpick those teeny tiny stitches. After all, if you touch something, things may get wonky…