Every year I make my kids new pajamas for Christmas. I look forward to it so much. Here in Part 1 of my Christmas Pajamas blog post, I'm going to show you how I made the pants. Then next week I'll show you how I made the tops.
This year I used the free Simple Pants pattern that is one of the free downloads when you sign up for the Sew Can She daily newsletter {click here to see}. (If you already receive the newsletter, but you want to download your free patterns again, you'll have to unsubscribe and then re-subscribe for the newsletter. When you confirm your subscription, you'll get a link to the download page.) I have two boys and two girls so I wanted them to match in some way, but the boys to be more boyish. And I had a problem... not enough of any one fabric to make two pairs of pants. After much deliberation, I decided to cut up a whole bunch of fabrics and make my own patchwork fabric. All of the fabric I picked was knit. Just so you, the Simple Pants Pattern download works great with both wovens and knits.
Here's my piles of cut fabrics. I made all of my pieces 5" tall, but with random widths from 3-7". That really helped speed up cutting.
I made the girly 'patchwork fabric' first and was really careful about arranging all the pieces into rows, then arranging the rows aesthetically. Blah. It took a long time.
It did make some really cute fabric, though. Pretty lumpy. But adorable. I just laid my pattern pieces down on here and cut out. I'll give you some measurements at the end so if you try this you'll know how much 'fabric' to make.
I made the 'fabric' for the boys' jammes on a different night and was too lazy to arrange each square in a pleasing pattern. I just serged them all together in a looooong strip trying to not put similar pieces too close together. Then I cut the strip into smaller strips all the same length. And then sewed these into 'fabric.' I must admit that this second method was way, way faster, but I didn't have too much control over where the polka-dotted pieces ended up.
Connor's pants (on the left) had one pant let turn out a bit boring. And Carl's pants (on the right) were way busy, with some interesting polka dot patches on the front. Whatever. They are adorable.
The girls' pants turned out pretty much like I expected since I had arranged the pieces so painstakingly. This pattern is really, really quick to make so about 95% of my time was spent making the fabric.
So... if you decide to try to make patchwork jammie pants like these, I figured out just how much 'fabric' you'll have to make.
My best advice for making your fabric is to make more than you need. At least for knit patchwork anyway. The fabric bunched up a bit which is really cute, but I was almost short even though I thought I was making plenty.
Now, even though those shirts may look all plain, they're not! Watch for my next Christmas Pajama blog post to see how I made them super adorable.
By the way, there's tons of adorable pajama patterns coming out right now if you want something different. Just look at the adorable ones at Peek-a-boo Pattern Shop and Create Kids Couture.
Happy Christmas sewing!
