Sewing – Page 10

Extending Clothing Life – Making Pants & Sleeves Longer

I talked about how to make jammie pants into shorts and how to make long sleeve T’s into short sleeves. However, sometimes clothing is too short and needs to have something added to it.

My daughter (like most girls I’m sure) has certain items of clothing that she loves to wear. When they get too small, she hates to see them go and on occasion will try to convince me that they really aren’t too small. Sometimes, I can fix them. One of my favorite fixes is sewing ruffles on shorts, skirts, or pants that have gotten too short.

These shorts were just too short. So, I found some material that coordinated and sewed a band on each leg. Presto, decent length shorts again.Another favorite outfit is her fleece set made with kitty material. I think I made it in 2010 so it’s getting short again!

It was a little long when I made it, but after a couple years, they were getting short. So I had some of the material leftover, but anything that coordinates would work. Cut pieces long enough to make the sleeves or legs the right length and then add an inch and a half to allow for seams and hems.

Because fleece doesn’t unravel and fray, I just zig zagged the edges rather than doing an actual hem. If you wanted to do a hem, you can just turn the edges under and sew it with a straight stitch.

The Side Effect of Remaking Jammies

The other night I was reading to my kids when my daughter yelled at her youngest brother. When I turned to see what he was doing (he was being very quiet), this is what I saw.

Fortunately these jammie pants were too short so it was no big deal, but we did have a short conversation about asking Mommy before cutting clothing.

Kids Jammies – Extending Clothing Life

Extending Clothing Life - Kids Jammies

I’ve been working on updating my kids wardrobes. Like I said here, a lot of their clothes were too wintery, but some of them can be modified to fit our warmer Florida climate.

My kids love the cotton knit jammies like these.

They’re great when they’re new, but they seem to shrink up after several washings (not that my kids mind!). I decided that it would be very easy to turn them into shortie jammies.

First, cut off the legs. I just eyeballed how long I wanted them, but you could also use a pair of shorts as a pattern.Use the leg you cut off to measure the other one.
For this pair, I just serged the legs (I did a rolled hem, you could also zig zag stitch it).

I followed the same process for the second pair – cutting off the arms and legs (and just eyeballing the length). But instead of serging the hems, I turned the edges under and sewed them with a regular sewing machine.

Now my boys each have a “new” pair of jammies that are perfect for our new warmer climate.

Giving Kids Clothes New Life

Since we’ve moved to Southwestern Florida, we’ve been going through our winter clothes and deciding what to keep (it gets chilly here for a couple weeks) and what to pass on (yard sale, thrift store, re-purpose). Over the next few weeks I’m going to show you some simple ways to remake kids clothing.

Since we are from Western Pennsylvania, most of our shirts are long sleeved. Some of them are ones they really like and would really like to keep. For instance, this shirt – pink & sparkly. What girl wouldn’t love it?

My daughter is saying, “Mom is annoying.” She was not thrilled with having to model.

There are two ways to make this short sleeved. The easy way and the way I did it. The easy way is to just cut off the dark pink sleeve where it’s attached to the light pink shirt. Simple, no sewing, and presto, short sleeves.

Cut The Dark Pink Sleeve Off

The other way is to rip out the stitches and carefully cut where the two sleeves are joined.

Then re-hem the short sleeves which is easy – they’re already pressed so you don’t need to worry about making sure they’re even.

Short sleeves – much more appropriate for SWFL life.

Footie Pants

I’ve updated my Footie Pants page to include pictures of different options. I also added a Pricing page. It is by no means all inclusive, but it does give you an idea of some of the more popular materials and requests. I’m always willing to work with customers. To contact me, please go to SewMona and use the “contact shop owner” link on the left-hand side.