L's first pair of shorts were made from an old pair of my pants. The pants were still good they never got a lot of wear as I didn't like the colour on me and I never had anything to wear them with. Plus they were a smidge small when I bought them and I've put on weight since then. So I turned them into shorts for L.
I cut the pants down each seam leaving all pockets in place and cut each piece down to the size required. The only problem that I had was that the back pockets were in the wrong place and ended up being chopped off on the final product.
Oh well I doubt she would have ever used them. I cut off and cut down the existing waist band, elastic ad drawstring and was able to reuse that as well.
The only thing I did wrong was forget to straighten off the legs for the hem so when I went to turn up the hems I had a problem.
L's second pair of pants were something I've been thinking about for a quite some time. A while ago I was asked by a friend to make some pillows for her yoga studio. They wanted half of them in a teal green and half in a purple. I found some beautiful linen to make them out of and when I cut the triangular pillows out I ended up with quite a few right angle triangles left over. Not enough material to make anything out of by them selves, but I figured it'd be great to patch work the two colours together and make something and that's what I did here.
I cut a bunch of 4" square and sewed them together in alternating colours then used the resulting fabric to cut out a pair of shorts. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the waistband so in the end I just ended up sewing a piece of 2" wide black elastic as a waist band. All seams were finished on the overlocker to avoid the seams fraying.
A very simple pair of shorts, but quite striking. I really love this pair of shorts.
L's jumpsuit was made using the Closet Case File Sallie jumpsuit pattern.
I started with the size 0 pattern, took about 3/8" off the width of the both the top and shorts. I also raised the V neckline quite a bit so that I could eradicate the back tie - I figured that would be too hard to a 8 year old to do up. I puled the elastic a bit too tight along the neckline which has resulted in some puckering but at least it stays on her shoulders. The shoulder width was bought in by about 1" and tapered to the underarm. The pants were cut off to shorts length - with about a 4.5" inseam length and I cut down the size of the pockets a bit to make sure they fit within the smaller shorts. I'm very happy with how this turned out and L loves it.
J's shorts were made out of three cushion covers. I was given these cushions, covered in corduroy in bright primary colours, quite some time ago, but I don't generally like having cushions on my couch so the covers were resigned to my "to be remade into something else" pile. I finally got around to reusing them. There wasn't quite enough fabric to make the shorts out of a single colour. I thought about doing front and back in different colours but decided that would look a little weird and decided to go with stripes of all three colours instead. They turned out a but too big, but J will grow into them.
The tank top pattern for J was taken from L's tank top pattern and modified to look a bit more boyish.
Unfortunately I didn't do a good job on the armhole and neckline binding and the top half of it looks all puckered now.
I thought about taking the bindings off and redoing them, but that would mean getting J to take it off which has proved to be a problem so far - he loves this shirt which is very flattering - maybe I'll just make him a second one!
Finally for myself I made a new dress.
This is now the third attempt to use this material. It began it's life as a pale yellow knit fabric. I used it some of it to make L a shirt a couple of years ago but it was never a good colour. Always looked washed out and showed stains really easily so last year when I wanted to make a pool dress I decided to take the rest of the material and use it up. I made a dress using no pattern. I cut a hole in the middle for my head, added elastic around the waist and to gather up the shoulders, a small bust dart to give some shaping to the garment and I was done. But still the colour looked terrible. So I threw it in bucket of purple dye. The colour took pretty well, except around the gathers at waist and shoulder where I got more of a tie dye look. I wore the dress to the pool for a season, but never really loved it so I decided to remake it again this year.
I went back and pulled out my Sallie jumpsuit pattern with short skirt. There ended up being less material available than I originally thought there would be, but I managed to cut the kimono top pattern out of the existing skirt and had just enough in the original bodice to make a skirt if I put a seam up center front and center back. The left overs were then rummaged through to find pieces just big enough to make the pockets.
I didn't want to line the bodice of this dress so instead I used a heap of fashion elastic from Walmart to finish the neckline, armholes and pockets.
The resulting dress is ok for the pool but not the best dress in the world
Whoa! You have been busy! My favorites are the shorts made of squares and your pool dress.
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