Kids clothes! — Victoria Martinez

This shirt and these PJs were child-directed projects and fairly strong wins.

It all started bc baby girl still loves footie pyjamas, but they are not so common in the bigger than 2T sizes. So I took the kiddos to the local fabric store to find her something to make some with. She immediately homed in on the princess fabric, while little dude found himself wondering at how cool the quilting cottons were. So we got him one that looked “like a jungle,” on the condition that I could use it to make him a formal shirt, since he hates wearing button-ups to events.

Once we got going on planning the design of the clothes, he remembered that we’d also picked up a parrot print fabric for him awhile back at the local second hand craft store, Nefelibata. So we very carefully planned pattern placement for pockets and accents using tracing paper cut outs.

And buttons… oh, the buttons. He wanted dragons. And maybe monsters. Curse the novelty button section. To pull this off, I attached ring snaps to the button plackets and sewed the novelty buttons into the gaps. I think this should hold up well enough, even through the wash, since he won’t wear the shirt all that much.

Pattern grading, ft my kid’s help with marking notches <3

I used a much too large vintage pattern for his, graded down in width but not in length. Which is fine for the body but I forgot to grade down the arm length, so that’s a bit comical.

It’s very extra. He thinks it’s super cool. Mission accomplished.

For the sleeper, I used the Duo coverall pattern from Brindille and Twig. I truly think it’s even cuter than I did in when I was looking at the pattern photos, and I thought it was pretty cute then! I really love Melissa’s patterns and instructions, and find they produce a high-quality product even if I’m not familiar with methods. And they use fabric photo instructions, which I think is pretty hard to pull off well. But they do it! I particularly love the neckline finish