It's not easy sewing green

I have now successfully created a pair of pajama pants! Huzzah! It was only moderately difficult and time consuming. I decided that my first actual garment should be something that most people wouldn't see, that way it didn't need to be made perfectly. A couple of weeks ago, I managed to persuade my husband to go with me to Joann to buy some flannel to make PJ's out of. I chose an adorable Kermit the frog fabric for myself, while he selected a more masculine, baseball print. I assumed that I would mess up the project at some point (most likely during the cutting process), so instead of buying the required 2 1/2 yards of fabric, I purchased 4 yards. With my simple pattern from Walmart and a whole furlough day off to sew, I set about my task.

I did some quick Googling to research how I should go about making the pants. Again, I've seen my mother put together costumes using patterns in the past, so I felt I knew the basic steps.
Step 1: Pick the appropriate size on the pattern paper, and cut it out.
Step 2: Lay the fabric down flat and use the pattern to cut out the right shape on the fabric.
Step 3: Sew everything together.
Step 4: Enjoy comfy new PJ's.


Right away, I realized I had a small conundrum. I was going to make the pants for myself first, and then use the same pattern to create a pair for my husband using different fabric. However, his pants would need to be larger than mine, so I wouldn't be able to use the pattern if I cut out my own size first. Following that logic, I decided to cut out the large size of the pattern first and use it to cut out my husband's fabric. Then, I cut the pattern paper to the medium size (which made me happy after I consulted the measurements on the instructions; it's always nice to wear something that is a medium since I normally only wear large), and used that medium pattern to cut out my Kermit fabric. All that cutting, and pinning of the pattern to the fabric, and cutting again, and thinking about how to cut took about 2 hours. I was pretty disheartened at that point, guessing that the sewing process was going to take twice as long as the cutting.


So now I had my two oddly shaped pieces of fabric, plus a long skinny piece I would use later to make into a drawstring. At the beginning of all this, I had glanced at the directions, not understood a word of my they were saying, and decided to wing it. I took the edges that matched up logically and pinned them together. In only a few minutes, I had sewn my first seam on clothing! It was so easy!


But then, I tried to figure out where I should sew next, and realized I had put the legs together completely wrong. Instead of pants with two legs, I had the beginning of a very tight, longs skirt. There was only one way to fix it: rip out the beautiful, perfect seam I had just created. Luckily, the sewing kit I'd recently purchased included a stitch ripper-outer (officially known as a seam ripper, what a logical name!). This fun little tool looks like a miniature javelin with a sort of hook. I learned they are extremely intuitive to use because I just started putting the hook down the middle of the seam, pulling gently, and the stitches came out fairly quickly. Also, luckily, there was an episode of "Say Yes to the Dress" for me to watch on TV during this tedious task.


As I started to put the pants together again, I consulted the directions carefully. I ignored the written directions, which were full of sewing terms I'd never heard of, and stuck to the pictures. The first picture that made any sense to me (there were a couple others that showed how to make a button fly, but I decided to forgo that step) demonstrated sewing the inseams of the legs to themselves up until the crotch. This made a lot more sense that sewing things together randomly. I made a kind of cylinder with each leg piece, wrong-side out, of course, and carefully sewed the inseams. Then (and this was the crucial step that had confused me earlier) I turned one of the legs right-side out and placed it inside the other leg. This way, I was able to sew together all the pieces at the crotch and waist. At this point, I was able to try on my half-completed garment to find: they looked like real pajama pants! Now, all I had left to do was create little gap up at the waist and hem the legs, which were far too long. Both of those steps were easily accomplished. On to the drawstring! This was where I hit a snag. While I had sewn a seemingly straight seam down the length of the fabric strip, when I went to turn it right side out, the seams began to come apart. Not wanting to redo the entire drawstring (and not really wanting to turn the whole, skinny thing right-side out), I improvised. I remembered that I had a large amount of ribbon from my wedding rehearsal bouquet (which is made of ribbons from shower gifts). Notably, I had about a football field's worth of dark purple ribbon from the packages off our Bed, Bath and Beyond Registry. You see, nearly every gift we received was off of our registry, which was gift wrapped by Bed, Bath, and Beyond, so I literally have tons of purple ribbon left over. Which certainly came in handy today!


After using a safety pin to pull the ribbon through the waistband, I was able to try on my completed garment, which looks like an actual pair of pajama pants! And here they are, in all their green glory!

The next project will be a similar pair for a husband, which will hopefully go even smoother. I should probably buy some better ribbon for his drawstring, though. Purple does not go with his baseball themed print.
Sew ya later, alligator! Er . . . frog, that is.