Category: kiddo clothes

Polka dot Ice Cream Dress

I finally sewed an Oliver + S pattern! I feel like I’ve gained entrance to some secret society. 🙂 The fabrics were a pair of polka dots from our Vashon Island trek. (The photos aren’t quite true, the teal dots are brighter in real life than in these evening photos.) It’s been quite a project, spread over many, many naptimes in the last three weeks. Natasha was here to babysit tonight, and I finally finished it off. The pattern is wildly detailed – all sorts of overstitching and understitching and hem finishing and interfacing and ironing seams in different directions. I learned so much and I’m so happy with the way it turned out.
This is the ice cream dress, view A, in the 12-18 month size.

I still need to find a button for the back at the neck.

Isn’t it bright and sweet and cheerful? 🙂 It’s nicer in person, where you can appreciate all of the details. Shown here: gathers, neck hole notch, button loop, overstitching on the lined yoke.

The pockets have a band of accent trim with notches, and overstitching. The pattern has you stitch a seam to use as your fold line, it makes pressing the curve so much easier. I will do this more. There’s also overstitching on the yellow hem.

A detail of the sleeve. There are only two exposed hems in the dress (on the sides of the teal portion), and those are finished so they won’t fray. All of the remaining edges are trapped in the lining. It took ages to sew but it looks so pretty. That little teal hem at the underarm side of the sleeve is only an inch and a half long, and it looks so tiny and precise. Satisfying.

The bottom panel was worked in four pieces (front and back lining, front and back exterior), and again it trapped the unfinished teal edge so that everything looked pretty and finished. The hem used understitching – the first time I’ve heard the term but it’s supposed to make the hem lie flatter and have better structure. It looks SO pretty.

The sizing seems pretty true to the numbers, she is almost 10 months and this is still roomy. I can’t wait to find a good button. Right now it’s hanging on her wall – it’s such a cheerful, lovely finished thing.

Pajama parade: City pants

I loved this building print, and there was a coordinating taxi cab check that was the same soft, high quality fabric, so I got it even though it’s a bit seizure-inducing. These are a small nod to my brother David, who’s lived in New York City for five years now. 🙂

I forgot to take a picture, but the tag is a scrap of tractor ribbon – a small joke.

For the shirt, I sewed a 3/8″ bit of the yellow checkers along the bottom of a strip of buildings, then cut the tops and appliqued them as a city skyline.

Fiddly but fun, and I like the way it turned out against the red shirt.

Pajama parade: Cows

Cows and dots!

This fabric is probably my favorite combo of all six pairs of PJs, although it’s a tough call. Lots of favorites. The cows are such great fabric – saturated, festive but not chaotic, and great quality. The dots came from across the store and are a perfect match on the black and white (amazing how many shades of black there are!), and look so snazzy as an accent.

For the shirt, I didn’t want the dots right next to the black T fabric, so I did a ¼” band of black, and another ¼” of cows. I’m pleased with how it turned out.

Pajama parade: Dogs in trucks

Cheery red pickup trucks with labs in the back.

This fabric is particularly nice quality, it really feels great. The red lining is off the sale table, also feels great, and was a perfect find. Makes for a really cheerful waistband and (until he grows out of them) cuffs.

I’m especially proud of the appliqued patch on the matching shirt – I did a perfect job of getting it straight, the black stitching is perfectly aligned with the pattern, and the notches at the sleeves look borderline professional. Way more polished than my usual sewing.

Pajama parade: Frogs

Goofy cheerful frogs garooming all over, plus a sale table chartreuse lining that isn’t a perfect match but was exactly what I was looking for and complements the raucous jokester frogs.

I got to use my dots ribbon for the tag (even more essential now that H___ almost always puts the pants on himself – the first set in which the ribbons are more for his benefit than ours).

He’s worn the shirt to daycare twice, wasn’t ready to take it off after breakfast and campaigned for wearing his PJ shirt all day. 🙂 Kind of awesome, it’s so fun to make things he likes. A pity it’s white, but at least I can always make another one later if this one gets too paint-splattered. 🙂

Pajama parade: Duck pond

I finished the first pajama set! The fabric is a cheery duck print by Eric Carle.

And there’s an awesome bright orange lining.

The shirt has a matching oval of fabric, and after basting it on, I used the same stitch to keep it in place that I used for the third birthday shirt.

So, I took the photos and looked at them on the computer, and realized the shirt seemed really, really small in comparison to the pants. (The pants, to be fair, are big – extra length to grow into and a pretty loose waist, but still.) Sure enough, I had somehow used an old (ready to be tossed) 2T shirt instead of one of the new 4T shirts. Yikes. Still not entirely sure how that happened, and whether I did it or someone else “helped” by adding the shirt to the pile. I didn’t want to take the time for a whole big redo, so I snipped a blue border, and sewed it onto a new white shirt. Tada.

I don’t like it quite as much as the navy version, but as a 12 minute correction (including rebasting and restitching), I’ll take it over an evening with the seam ripper. If I hadn’t had the navy version to compare it to, I’d be delighted with it, so this will be the last I think of the original color scheme. 🙂

The finished set:

Pajama parade: Washington state

I found this Washington State fabric at the local fabric store, and while the quality isn’t spectacular, the subject matter certainly is: ferries, the space needle and Seattle skyline, Rainier, lots of evergreens, the market, salmon, Dungeness crabs, apples, cherries, a combine harvester, the tulip festival, otters, umbrellas, coffee, a seaplane…

In other words, the makings of pants with a thousand stories attached, perfect for the talkative three year old who loves conversations that start with, “Do you remember when I…?”

The shirt has a matching panel.

And even though my PJ pants are always lined, they aren’t usually reversible in the strict sense – one side is usually much more interesting than the other. True here, too, but the lining is such quintessential boys PJ pants, I had to do a flipped-inside-out picture.