Uniquely You Pajamas

 Yes - it's that time again!  The Pattern Review Sewing Bee has started.

This year the challenge for round 1 was to make a pair of pajamas that are "Uniquely You".  

 

I went to my fabric stash to see what I could find - I knew that I wanted to make a matching top and bottom, so that limited my options to only fabrics that I had 5 or more yards of.....that would be.....nothing.  Ok trip to the fabric store is necessary.  I look the drive time to think about just how I could make my pajamas unique.  For fabric I thought that I could try for something with a paisley pattern.  When we set up our Nintendo Online account we made sure the kids knew that they should never put any distinguishing information on the internet and got them to choose names for themselves to use with their account.  And of course I had to choose a name too.  I chose Paisley - so I figured that if I could find a good paisley material that could be a unique feature for me.

I spent quite some time at the fabric store trying to find the perfect fabric.  I found a beautiful green and black paisley cotton, but I didn't really want to make my pajamas top out of cotton as I wanted more comfort than that.  I found some cool flannel with little caravans on it and thought about getting that, but as much as I want to be a caravan person it's really been many years since I've been in one - so unfortunately not really me any more.

Then I found this rayon knit fabric.  It's a white fabric with a printed pattern on one side, the thing that really drew me to it was the pattern - It was a chaotic small print with many different designs, some of which were paisley, but more interestingly was the colours.  It was shades of blue and orange.  That's not a colour combination that you see a lot of but it's one I definitely love.

Long long ago when my Mum first started doing pottery, one of the first things she made for me was a set of mugs.  These mugs were decorated with blue and orange vertical stripes.  I really loved those mugs, but as usually happens (at least in my house) over the years just about all of my beautiful mugs have been broken.   I have just one single mug left from that set, and now that Mum is no longer able to do any pottery, no way of getting any more.  This print is a beautiful reminder of her.

Ok so now I had my fabric I needed to figure out my pattern.

I knew from the start that I wanted to make the Cashmerette Calder pants.  This is now my 4th pair of these and I love them.  These are the pants I reach for every morning and lament when there isn't a clean pair available.  They are pure comfort and yet look slightly fancy (to me anyway).  Generally I don't like wearing pants to bed - I find that they get tangled around my legs and are totally uncomfortable so I was really just looking for something that would be good for lounging around the house in the evenings and mornings (and you know... all the rest of the times I want to be in my pajamas) - so these would be perfect.

 

Next I had to make a decision on the top half.  I had already decided I wanted winter pajamas so long sleeves were necessary - and I really love the cuff on my sleeve on the new nighty I made - so I went with that again.  It keeps the sleeves down in bed, but also allows me to push them up to my elbows if I'm doing the washing up, or cleaning or what not.  

I knew I wanted the top to be fairly fitted so I started with the princess seam pattern I developed for this sweater for the main body and sleeves.

I cut the length of the pattern to be 1" above my high hip line to get that perfect length, not too long but not too short.  I wanted long enough to cover my lower back whilst I'm sitting around (the top half of my blue and black lounging suit is too short and it's really annoying) but short enough that it doesn't bunch up when sleeping.  I then added 2" wide ribbing around the bottom to compliment the ribbing at the sleeves.

The last thing to figure out was the neckline.  I decided I wanted to go with a traditional pajama look, but with a twist.  So I wanted the collared, buttoned up look, but I didn't want any buttons (they did in while I try to sleep) so decided to do a half placket with collar and collar stand.  

First the Placket.  I  had added one of these on my last nightgown, but I didn't like the difference in width between the under placket and the over placket so I took the pattern and modified it a couple of times to get what I was thinking of.  So now I have an under placket 1" wide and the over placket is just slightly wider at 1 1/8" wide so that it covers the under placket.  I'm really happy with the way this turned out.  When sewing the placket I made sure I interfaced the main body fabric before applying the placket, as well as the placket pieces, but I didn't totally press the interfacing so once the placket was finished I was able to tear away the interfacing along the stitching lines so that it was no longer visible.  

For the collar and collar stand I took the pattern pieces from the Cashmerette Harrison shirt (It was the easiest collared pattern for my to get my hands on - no other reason for this choice).  I then modified the length of the pattern pieces to accurately fit on my neckline.

Now to sew my pattern up:

I laid out my fabric to cut all my pieces and was trying to pattern match but quickly realised that this pattern is in no way symmetrical and no matter what I did there was no way that I was ever going to get anything to match up so instead I just cut the pattern pieces wherever they fit and then just checked that there were no glaring issues when they were side by side.  I did find that on one of my side princess pieces there was a blue stripe that just slightly misaligned with a different blue stripe on the center front piece so I threw that piece out and cut it again without a blue stripe.

For the pants, I wasn't sure how well the Calders would work in a really drapey clingy knit fabric, so since I prefer my pants nice and warm I decided to underline my main fabric with a flannel fabric.  I had bought a matching baby blue flannel at the store that matched beautifully so used that  as the underlining fabric.  Now to think about design features.  I wanted to add some piping - its a traditional pajama look.  I had looked at piping at the store and found that I liked the black best, everything else just blended in to the chaotic colours, plus the black would then tie in the black ribbing I wanted to use.

In order to make the pants look a bit more special I decided to make a stripe down the side seam of just the blue flannel material.  The Calder pattern actually makes this really easy as the side seam is actually already skewed to the front, so I was able to just stop the knit fabric shy of the side seam  on the back pattern pieces leaving a strip of the plain blue flannel that now sits right down the  side of the body. After a couple of trials I decided to make this stipe 3" wide and cut 3" off the side of the back pattern pieces cut out of the knit fabric (but left the blue flannel full width).   Now I could also add black piping down both sides of this stripe. I  turned under the edge of knit fabric and laid in on top of the flannel with a piece of piping in between and stitched it in place. 

Finishing details - I knew that I wanted these pajamas to look as good on the inside as they do on the outside.  For the pants I decided that the best idea would be to flat line the pants pieces.  This involves putting the main fabric and the underling fabric together right sides facing and sewing then together (with a 1/8"seam allowance) down the long edges (inside seam, crotch seam and outside seam for the front pieces), then turning everything inside right.  This means that now there are no cut edges along these seams, they are encased within themselves  - I then sewed the front and back pieces together at the crotch seams and pressed the seams open. 

The outside leg seams were a bit harder to deal with.  Because I stopped the knit fabric 3" from the side seam on the back pieces that edge was not finished. Plus I had to add pockets in.  I did this first, making the pocket bag from the flannel fabric but adding an interfaced piece of the knit fabric at the opening.  I sewed each side of the pocket onto the pants legs.  For the front pieces I then understitched the actual side seam down over the pocket seam enclosing that raw edge.  For the back I used some of the left over knit fabric to do a Hong Kong binding over all the raw edge on just that part of the seam.

I then used French seams to sew the pocket bags together, sewed the side seams and bound the back side seam from the pocket bag down to finish the rest of that seam.

Next was the waistband.  I made the back waistband out of the knit fabric, the outside of the front waistband from the knit and the inside of the front waist band out of the flannel.  Both the outside and inside of the front waistband were interfaced, and 1.25" elastic encased int he back waistband.  I attached the outside of the waistband pieces to the top the pants, pressed all the seams up, the folded over the waistband, turned in the seam allowance and top stitched in the ditch from the front all around to cleanly finish the waistband. 

The final step was the hem.  After trying them on I cut 2" off the length, turned the edge up 1/2" and machine stitched in in place, then turned the whole thing up again 1.5" and hand catch stitch the hem in place trying to only get the flannel layer in the stitching so you get a clean finish from the outside.

Finishing the shirt was a lot easier.  The princess seams, side seams, shoulder, and sleeve seams were all done using French Seams.

 The the ribbing at cuffs and waist I sewed one edge of the ribbing to the body, right sides together, folded the cuff in hand and turned in the seam allowance, and then used a decorative stretch stitch to secure the seam in place.

For the sleeves I wanted to somehow mirror what I had done on the pants with a stripe of the blue flannel peaking out.  I thought about a simple strip down the sleeve but wasn't convinced, then I decided to just colour block the sleeve so that there is and angled seam about 3/4 of the way down the sleeve where it changes from knit to flannel. 

 I played around the placement of the sleeve (also had to take about 2" of the length of the sleeve) until I was happy with the result.  I split my sleeve pattern and recut my sleeve pieces - I sewed them together with some more black binding between then and finished the seam using Hong Kong binding again.

The placket was all topstitched so that it looks as neat from the inside as from the outside and the last seam of the collar was hand sewed so that the whole collar assembly is as neat as I could get it.

Now there was just one more thing that I needed to do.  I needed to add a creative element, something that made these uniquely me.  I decided that adding hand embroidery to the blue flannel sections would work.  I originally imagined much embroidery, but in the end only ended up doing one small piece on the left sleeve. 

I want the embroidery design to be something that was unique to me so thought about what it was that made me me.  I decided I wanted to try and combine my two big passions.  Airplanes and sewing and came up with a design of a airplane (747 of course) that has wing tip vortices streaming off the wing tip and then spiraling around a spool of thread.  

I then added a little paisley design to the body of the plane.....Paisley is in the plane?

I sketched it up, then had to figure out how to transfer the design to my fabric. I tried my tracing wheel with tracing paper, but since the design is so small it wasn't easy - I ended up just drawing the design on lightly in pen.  Embroidering it was even harder as I couldn't easily access the back since the sleeve was already made it.  I did a trial run first on a flat piece of fabric - just to iron out the kinks, and then started on the real thing.  It took me a lot longer than expected - that's why there was only one little design in the end.  But I got it done and was quite cute when it was finished.

The final piece to this set is a comfy bra.  I had originally thought of incorporating a shelf bra into the top and this started out as that - but it didn't work out so I decided to go ahead and just make this up as a separate piece.  Its a really basic bra - based on my standard bra pattern, but without separation of the bridge and cups and the cups are cut as a single piece with one dart. The elastic at the bottom is covered in the knit fabric.  The front and back pieces are lined in another knit fabric and then the center has been closed with a stitch to provide just a little shaping.   It really has no left properties is more about containment than support.

And so now I have a beautiful pair of pajamas.  They are super comfortable. I put them on to get pictures then refused to take them off for three days....