30 Minute Men's Pants to Boy's Jammies - A Tutorial

I was tempted to title this post "How to Turn a Pair of Way-Too-Big-But-I-Lost-the-Receipt Men's Pajama Pants into a Pair of Boy's Jammie Pants Tutorial"...but that seemed a little long.  Since the pants were based on the 30 minute pants, I shortened it. ;)  And I figured that, instead of just saying "Hey, I chopped these up and made something new", that I'd try working it up as a tutorial, just in case anyone else has a similar pair of way-too-big pants hanging around.

(This is my first attempt at a tutorial quite like this, so please let me know if anything is confusing!)

All you need is a pair of men's pajama pants, and 30-60 minutes, depending on the frequency and length of your distractions.

A little bit of back story...

Back in December, I picked up a pair of pajama pants for Richard.  Yes, I could have made him some myself.  I'd messed about with the idea.  But I was feeling swamped with other projects, I always end up totally frozen by incompetence when I try to sew something for myself or my husband, and Old Navy was running them at such a low price that I couldn't even buy fabric for that little.  So I opted to save myself some stress, time and money and just buy them.  My mistake came when a bout of indecisiveness hit at the store.  I had the perfect pair of pajama pants in my hand, decided against them and hung them back up, then changed my mind again and picked them back up.  Only problem being that, while I had closely checked the size the first time that I picked them up, I didn't when I went back for them.  The size tag on the hanger read medium, but the pants were actually XXL.  WAY too big.  And we put off returning them until I'd lost the receipt, so they've just kind of been hanging around waiting for me to either chop them up or donate them to Goodwill.  Bug decided that he really liked the idea of having matching pajamas with Daddy, so I decided to chop them up.

Here's how:

First, wrangle your small children out of the pants...

I love the look of adoration she has for him here.  We see that face a lot.

Lay out the pants and determine how much length you need for your little person.  Use a pattern that you love to determine how long they need to be.  Keep in mind that you're not going to have to hem the pants because you'll be using the existing hem.  Remove the pants legs with enough length to cut out your new pattern.  (Since I'll still be using the top of the pants to make a pair of shorts for Richard, I also made sure that I had enough length left to do that.)

Cut the pants legs open along the INSIDE seam so that you can lay the fabric out flat.  I would recommend giving them a good pressing here, just to make sure that nothing goes wonky in the next few steps.  I'm a big fan of excessive pressing.

Once the fabric is open and flat, lay the cut open pants legs with RIGHT sides together.  If there was an outer leg seam on the original pair of pants, make sure that you match it up.  I suggest pinning along the seam, if there is one, and making sure that the bottom hems are even.

Lay your pattern piece on top of the flattened pajama fabric, putting the outer seam where it would fall on the finished pair of pants.  I used a pattern of my own making that doesn't usually finish with an outer seam, so made sure that the existing outer seam fell in the center of the pattern piece, along the grain line.

Pin and cut out your pattern.

I suggest marking front and back at this point, just to keep things from getting confusing later.  I always put a safety pin on the outside near the center back seam, but do whatever works for you.

At this point there was mayhem with my little people, so I had to walk away for a moment.  Which necessitates "Remove cat from your fabric" as the next step in my house.

Chin says these are super cozy pants!

Now you'll sew the legs up.  Match up each piece at crotch and hem and sew.  It's all right if they don't match up perfectly, though I do try to make sure that the fabric matches nicely at the hem.  It's a little easier to fix extra fabric at the top of the leg.

Because the fabric on this particular pair of pants is somewhat thin and I worried a little about it falling apart at the hands of my active boy, I opted to put in french seams.  If you trust your fabric, serging would work just as well.

Once both legs are sewn up (and you've pressed that seam open), you'll need to attach them.  Turn one leg inside out and the other right side out.  Because I was doing a french seam, I set them inside one another RIGHT sides together, and then flipped them to WRONG sides together and stitched again.

Now turn the pants inside out and mark your waistband.  Again, because of the lightweight fabric, I wanted to make sure that the stitching wasn't going to pull out, so I marked a fold like 1/2 inch from the top edge, and another 1 inch below that.  Press and pin.

Then stitch your waistband, leaving an opening at center back for elastic.  I like to stitch just at the top edge of the waistband, too, to keep it from rolling around while Bug is wearing them.

Insert your elastic.  Make sure to test the waistband size on your little one, if necessary, and then stitch the ends of your elastic together.

Close the casing and you're all done!  (I added a little twill tape tab, so that Bug could tell front from back.  he admonished me for not adding a frog loves monkey label - ha!)

Try the pants on your little person and then just TRY to get them to take them off!

Seed Bombs - Sort of a Tutorial

Today, Bug and I made seed bombs.  I think.

We've been talking about doing it for awhile,  I read a whole bunch of tutorials, then ran out and picked up the things we were missing (just the clay, really).  But I didn't look at any of the tutorials again, so I kind of feel like I left something out.  It was really super easy, and really super fun, and something that the four year old had a whole lot of fun with, too.

If you want to trust it, I'll set this up a bit like a tutorial.  And I'll update once I see how they work out in the world!

(A few real tutorials can be found here, here, and here, if you want to double-check or get a second opinion.)

Here's what Bug and I did...

We gathered:

Compost.  There was a little bit of mulch left in the awesome spinning composter that my sister gave us.  Before I realized that I had picked up a small bag of potting soil, but I'm fairly certain that this project would not have been as successful with regular potting soil.

 We ended up breaking up the larger chunks in our compost, which was really dry, and spreading it onto a work-surface plate to make it easier to handle.  I'd imagine that moister compost would be much easier to work with.

Clay.  As you can see in the first picture, we went with the Crayola air-dry clay.  It was the only brand that I could find and it was labeled as "natural".  I'd have preferred to *know* that it's natural, but since we chose flower seeds and not vegetable seeds, I didn't figure it was *quite* as important.

Seeds.  Make sure that you pick a native and non-invasive species.  We went with a selection of poppies.

Water.  I totally forgot about the water.  Which would have made this whole process SO much easier.  My only excuse is that I was trying to get everything set up as quickly as possible after Boo went down for her nap so that Bug and I could actually get the seed bombs made. 

So, how we did it...

We picked a little bit of the clay and rolled it into a ball...

Then put a depression into the ball (because mashing them into flat circles on the plate made them next to impossible to pick up again - wax paper might have been an better idea) and dropped a few seeds and a little bit of compost into the middle of the ball before rolling it back up again.

Then we rolled the whole thing in the compost, to coat the outside.  In all honesty, I'd hoped for better coverage on the outside.  Pretty sure that forgotten little bit of water would have helped a ton with that.

 Then we set them aside.  In a day or so, they should be dried enough to toss out into the world.

Bug had SO much fun rolling the balls and putting the seeds inside.  He could have cared less about the compost - which was funny considering how excited he is about the compost in general - so he left some of his uncoated.  And then he just started mashing things together and playing with the clay, which was cool.  He sprinkled some chia seeds on his artwork, too.

 Please ignore the mayhem in the background. Our cabinets are in desperate need of a coat of paint and I really should have mopped...but it seemed like a silly thing to do just before we made a big mess with seeds and clay.

This is where we ended with the seed bombs today.

Bug's ready to make more NOW.

If anybody's made seed bombs, or tries some after reading this, I'd love to hear about it!

Felt Eggs and a Sort-Of Tutorial

I've been in love with play food for awhile.  We started collecting it when Bug was about eight months old.  (We got an awesome crocheted set of fruit and veggies from my friend Crystal at Loin Cloth.  I highly recommend asking her for a set.)  When Bug got his play kitchen for Christmas last year, we added a fairly good selection of wooden food.  We've never managed any felt food, though I've been eyeballing it for awhile.  It's just so cool looking!

After having read a million and four tutorials on making felt (not felted...still out of my league) play food, I decided to take the plunge and try to whip some up in time for Christmas.  I'll split what I make between Bug and his best friend back in Texas, who's been really into his kitchen and store set-up.

Here's my take on eggs.  And I aplogize if I'm essentially repeating someone else's tutorial.  I've read a lot of them and absorbed a lot of tips from different places but ended up winging it.  Not trying to steal from anyone. :)

I started with two sheets of off-white and one of yellow-orange poly felt.  I would have preferred wool, but it was outside of my budget.

On one sheet of off-white felt, I drew egg-y shapes.  I managed five, though with better planning I think I could have gotten six to fit.  Sorry, no photo of that step.

I found a round lid that was a good size for the egg-y shapes, and cut circles out of the yellow felt.  Pinned them in place on top of the single sheet of off-white.



Because I thought it would look nice, I used a zig-zag to stitch the yolks in place.



When the yolk pieces were almost sewn into place, I paused and stuffed just a tiny bit of stuffing beneath.  I was thrilled to discover bamboo fill but, again, the poly stuff was in my price range.  Wool roving or small fabric scraps would also work.  Or you could just leave them flat.  That looked nice too, but I wanted them a little puffy.



Once all the yolks were sewn into place, I pinned the second off-white sheet of felt to the back (to add a bit of thickness and make them a tiny bit more stiff) and stitched just inside the lines I'd drawn. When all of the eggs had been sewn together, I cut between the stitching and the drawn lines and...voila!  Eggs!