#kidsclothesweek

Its started! Kid's Clothes Week has started! Did you know you can follow @kidsclothesweek on instagram? There are tons on examples of works in progress and already some finished pieces gracing the hashtag #kidsclothesweek. You can follow me, and see some of my work in progress, @kristi_sweetkm.

Because I think it does some psychological good to cross something completely off the list early, I’m starting out easy. I’m carrying over a few concepts from my initial KCW planning. The crazy homemade fabric for one. I made J a pair of Sunny Day shorts a few weeks ago, so I knew these would be a quick, easy, sure fitting sew. Knowing that the fit and construction are under control gives me complete freedom to dream up a few new embellishments. The embellishing makes sewing these simple shorts a lot more fun.

First embellishment is the fabric. This started out as my standard Joann light weight denim that I balled up in no particular way and wrapped with a few rubberbands to hold the shape. Then I bleached it beyond recognition in a large pot of about 2 gallons of water and about 2 cups of bleach. I stirred the toxic mix around so there were no pockets of bleach, then I drowned my ball of cloth in it. The cloth tends to float a little bit out of the water, so I put the lid from a smaller pot on top of the ball and weighed it down with shampoo bottles and forgot about it for 6 hours. Then I rinsed and washed it twice in the washing machine. The balling/rubberbanding turns out to be unnecessary. I tried another piece without, and it still gets the variation from light to dark. I am still looking for a way to get a more uniform color change.

I’m also building on the Love YourLunch Box (psst...don't forget to enter the giveaway) sewing from last week (be sure to stop by and enter the pattern giveaway) with a few little patches of topstitching. I went round and round in my head with accent fabric, or little embellishments for these shorts, but in the end decided less (but not nothing, I haven’t gone completely insane) is more. So I topstitched one side of the front pocket in white lines 3/8” apart. I also worked some pocket magic on the tushie. More white lines of stitching, and a little tab in a triangle of unbleached denim.

I could make 10 more pairs of these shorts and not run out of fun little things to do to them. But, now that I’ve evened the score a bit with some little boy sewing, tomorrow I’m going to focus on L. Capris perhaps…

linking to KCW here.

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Check out the aforementioned GIVEAWAY of any of Gingercake’s lovely and versatile lunch bag patterns. After this week of frantic photo shoots with squirmy kids, sewing a bag (rather than garment) will be a refreshing change!

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