I made these trousers for Master One the other day. Well. I kind of cheated. You see, my little boy has become a turbo-charged tank, crawling around the place like he’s on a serious mission. His delicate baby clothes are being tested for toughness every day. And they’re not doing too well. In the toughness department, that is.
When his first pair of trousers developed a pair of holes, I was tempted to convert them to rags. The upcycler in me knew better. I cut off the holey knee sections of the trousers , leaving the top waist/bottom part (the red, top in the photo above) and the two trouser-leg bottoms (red trouser bottoms in photo). I replaced the removed pieces with sturdy but soft fabric from my old corduroy jeans.
To minimise my sewing I cut the old jeans fabric to include the original inner-leg seams. Then it was just a matter of cutting the width to match the original baby trousers pieces, with allowance for the outer-leg seams. I matched the pieces together with right sides facing, sewed up the seams and zig-zagged the seam edges to finish. Very simple.
Unfortunately I didn’t snap any pics of the process. But I’ve started on some other kids’ clothes puzzle-piece mix ‘n’ match projects and photographed the cutting up and piecing together steps.
Baby jumpsuit becomes a shirt/jacket (I’d already cut the feet off these a while back thinking they could become a footless jumpsuit then discovered some holes in the legs, around the buttons). I just need to hem the bottom.
Pyjama (long) bottoms become pyjama shorts or undies (post-nappies). Again a simple matter of hemming the bottom edges. (Look at those holes in the legs! Some heavy duty crawling has been going on here.) There will be a use for the non-holey parts of the leg bottoms too.
More of Master One’s handiwork – stains and holes again (see second photo). Plus they were a bit short. I’ll join them to the bottoms of the grey trousers to make a new pair with longer legs.
(Woops I’d already discarded – cut up for stuffing – the removed crutch section of these grey trousers before taking photos. They belonged to Miss Four before she wore some holes in the rear! I’d attempted a repair initially but it came apart after one wear!)
This final one might be interesting. But I’ll see how it turns out. I actually cut the grey women’s T-shirt up to make T-yarn (the centre piece was used to make this) so was left with some scrap fabric which I cut up for the skirt below. The pink T-shirt fabric was also left over from making T-yarn. I’ll try to piece them together with the top of the grey trousers from the pic above.
Hopefully the overlocker for which I’m excitedly waiting, will make the joining together of these stretchy fabrics much easier. I’ll post some photos of the finished pieces when I’m done. Just to show that they don’t look totally ridiculous.
Two Striped Cats 