Crafty Adventures of the Little Wiggly Fingers: Recycled Children's PJs

Recycled Children's PJs

Ahren is going through a huge growth spurt and suddenly none of his clothes fit him. His 6 yr old clothes are all in a bag in the corner of the living room because I refuse to throw anything away and the storage boxes under the bed are full of clothes from the past 6 years. So the fact that we have literally run out of storage space and because Toby keeps eyeing up my various craft-materials/projects-that-I'll-finish-one-day and saying 'we really need to start throwing stuff out' has made me tackle them, starting with some old jammies (and this time I took lots of pictures).

I grabbed a pair of pyjamas that Ahren insists on wearing even through they're way too short...

and laid them out flat. I chopped off the cuff that was around the bottom of the trousers and measured how much fabric I needed to add to make them long enough. I cut enough to go around the bottom of the leg from the front and back of the top using the existing seam and just sewed it on the trousers to extend the legs. Not the prettiest but it works.

Then I took a plain white t-shirt and cut off the arms so that I could add baseball sleeves in another colour using the part of the tee that I cut out as a template.

I used a yellow ribbed jersey fabric that was a similar colour to the pattern on the jammies to make the new sleeves. I wanted long sleeves so I just used a ruler to lengthen them before cutting the fabric.

Next I copied one of the space invaders from the pattern onto some lined paper and cut out to make a template. I pinned this to the old jammies sleeve and cut out.

Then I stitched it onto the front of the t-shirt with my sewing machine (I had planned to hand sew it but it wasn't too fiddly with the machine because it was all straight lines).