Getting the MOST from Kids Clothes

I have a confession: I don’t spend any time pre-treating stained clothing. Everything gets sorted, washed, and dried, if it ends up stained oh well! I know that a lot of you are probably appalled, but the reason I am like this is because I almost NEVER buy new clothes for the kids, almost everything is used or home made. Once in a while I will buy a “character” shirt or they will receive new clothing as gifts. The majority of their (and my) clothing comes from the Goodwill ($.99 sale) or yard sales.Just because I don’t worry about stains doesn’t mean that I want them looking like they are wearing second hand clothes, so thank goodness I can sew.
Now that spring is here it’s time to dig out all of the holey jeans, (second hand pants do wear through the knees a little quicker) and make some shorts. While one or two pairs of actual cut offs are okay, I will not just hack the legs off of all of their pants and let them fray. Today I re-did two pairs of jeans in two separate ways with almost the same results. The finished shorts look like they have always been shorts and will last through the summer (and may even be resold when they’re outgrown).
I have three pairs from Little Miss to fix, today I’m going to do a simple hem.  Her pants were easy, cut off the legs and cut the hem off of the bottom of the legs. Sew the old hem to the newly cut shorts edge and topstitch over old stitching.
On the right you can see the finished pants compared to just cut on the left. Sewing that hem back on really makes all the difference.Little Sir’s pants were in the same shape. I like to make his shorts longer, it’s just a better look for him. I cut the pants off right at the holes and cut the hems off of the pants, but OH NO, these pants are tapered at the bottom and there isn’t enough to just match and sew!!! (This happens a lot) First I turned under the raw edge and hemmed the pants, then I cut the hem apart and sewed it on like trim. Once it is sewn on I trimmed the raw edge close to the stitching, there will be a little fraying, but it should just look like wear.I know that it looks odd when I point it out, but if you don’t look closely (and most people don’t) it looks fine. See? Hard to notice, right?
So this is how I really get my money’s worth out of pants. The top pair I got for a dollar AND she wore them all winter before I made them into shorts. Little Sir’s pair I got at a bag sale, a whole bag full of clothes for $2.00 (pretty sure there were at least 8 items in the bag), so $.25 for all winter wear and now all summer too!
I have a stack of pants to finish up today, Little Miss will be getting some stenciled (to hide some stains) shorts and Little Sir will have some patch-y (to cover some holes) shorts. Look for finished pictures on the Facebook page. Now I just need to come up with some shirts!
How do you get the most value out of your kids clothes?

Rainbow Twirl Dress

Rainbows have recently started showing up in Little Miss’s drawings and she often tells me she likes all the colors, except black and so making her a rainbow dress just seemed like a good idea.  I saw this dress on craftster years ago (okay, I just went and looked, 2007!) and have been wanting to make it ever since.
Vegbee (craftster name) has a free tutorial on her blog indietutes for the rainbow twirl dress. She also a ton of other tutorials that are on my must sew list (check the full list on the left hand sidebar).  She also offers a more detailed version in her etsy store SweetShop with the bodice pattern piece and exact number of patches to complete a finished dress.  I opted to purchase the pattern, cut and sew without math was completely worth $4.00!  The pattern is very detailed and easy to follow and the results are fabulous.
I really want to make one using scraps, but this time I wanted the rainbow and sorting through my extensive stash to find a rainbow was NOT going to happen!  I bought a batik jellyroll from W-mart and supplemented it with a few extra 1/4 yard batik cuts.  I needed a lot extra of purple and yellow batik is hard to find.I sewed the strips together and made alternating patchwork in the designated lengths.  I wish I had a serger, it would have made the process much faster.  I used my handy cording foot to zigzag over dental floss to gather the layers up.  I honestly would not recommend trying to gather this up in the traditional way, with two rows of stitching, pulling the bobbin threads.  She suggests using elastic and I’m sure that would give you a nice, even gather.  I like using denatal floss because it’s cheap and it slides easily through the zigzags to make gathers and it is impossible to break, once each layer was sewn together I removed the floss and then finished all the edges.Here’s the finished dress all laid out in a circle.  That purple tier took forever, it was over 12 feet long.  This is great beginner pattern, really, it’s almost entirely straight sewing, except for the curves on the bodice.  Seriously, I LOVE this dress and now I want one in my size.  I’m not kidding, I’m going to be sorting through my massive stash and cutting squares as I go, but first I need to do some math (ugh) and figure out how many squares and tiers I’m going to need. Here are the action shots from yesterday’s egg hunt.  There was a lot of spinning.  I really need to make her some matching bloomers to wear under this, she is not very lady like ;)

Zombie Bunnies

So I've been crafting away for my swap partner(Bargain Hunter Round 5) and I was working on a few extras for the package. I wanted to make her a stenciled or painted shirt, but it just wasn't in my $5.00 budget, so what about an iron on patch...hmmm. What to put on the patch, I checked her profile for things she loved and saw bunnies and zombies, what about zombie bunnies? I googled "zombie bunnies" and there were over a dozen pages, wow, who knew? This threadless shirt was my starting point and I came up with these.

Here they are after painting, but before outlining. I just traced the sketches I made using pencil onto some muslin type fabric and painted them with acrylic paints mixed with textile medium.I outlined them with dimensional fabric paint, I think it made them look more evil. Once they are dry I'll fuse some stitch witchery on the back and cut them out and then they will be ready to iron on anything!