Friday, October 19, 2012

Friday Felicities


My felicity for this week is: Frugality!

You don’t have to be a parent to know that children tend to have the rather expensive habit of growing out of things – mostly clothes and shoes. Mine is no exception. When I bought her some long-sleeved shirts last year, I purposely erred on the larger side with the size, hoping she could get two years out of them.

I was only half-successful. The sleeves and torso still fit, but the length was a problem because the shirts had shrunk up with repeated washings.

Luckily, however, I found this tutorial on Pinterest before I chucked the shirts into the hand-me-down pile! I changed it up a bit and stitched the ruffle right down on top of the shirt's hem so as to maximize the ruffly goodness which I knew would go over well with G.

ruffle shirt

Success! I ruffle-ized three shirts: I used scraps for one, cut strips from a repurposed t-shirt of mine for another, and for the third, I redeployed a WOF strip of jersey I’d tried (unsuccessfully) to make work as a scarf last year.

In other frugal news, I also made a pair of leggings for G. She doesn’t really like jeans or cords (see above-mentioned waistband management strategy) but leggings are A-OK.

clothing
new leggings and ruffled shirt

I love the look of them under dresses and skirts and I particularly enjoy her creative legging/skirt combos. I’ve tried to draft my own leggings patterns before but they never worked properly so I broke down and bought a pattern (Kwik Sew 3476). They took a grand total of 30 minutes to make from cutting out to stitching the hems on the legs, plus G put them on right away so I TOTALLY WIN AT LEGGINGS!

Okay, my dears, share your felicities this week!

11 comments:

  1. Really cool idea. I'm always one for getting more use out of clothes. I'm betting though that my son wouldn't appreciate something like this. LOL

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  2. what a great idea!!!! I used to make my daughter leggings too! And they are a snap to make! what a great model she is!

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  3. Awesome! Good for you. It works like this in our family: oldest son wears clothes until they don't fit him anymore, then youngest son gets them and destroys them!! Seriously, he is SO hard on clothes. I do not understand it. Sometimes I wonder what he all gets up to at school. :)

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  4. What a great idea! You do rock at ruffles! I wonder if I could convince my guys to wear ruffles. LOL!

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  5. One cool thing about girls is Ruffles! Now, if only that could work on boys clothes! ... LOL

    Hurrah for frugle-minded people! Clothes are so expensive! I was talking to a cousin the other day about a pair of Osh-Kosh jeans and the price tag was $60! Really? I don't even pay that much for jeans for me! So I have taken to turning our old holed clothes into stuff for little man, why not when you've already paid the money? :)

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  6. excellent! I miss the days that I could sew for my girls.... these days my olders has been maing her own skirts, scrounging through my stash to steal fabric.

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  7. nevermind the clothes - SHE is SO CUTE!! : )))

    Nice sewing Felicity!

    ~Monika

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  8. yay! i'm so glad that the leggings worked out, and the ruffled shirt looks awesome!

    you can also do a non-ruffled one using another shirt that she's outgrown, cut off the hem with about 6 inches above it, then sew the raw edge behind the hem of the shirt you're fixing. it'll look like she's layering t shirts, without the added bulk of two shirts! (it also works well for boys who won't wear the ruffles!)

    i'm glad you found a pattern that worked. does it include your size too? i lent my smaller tights pattern to a friend (that i drafted myself), but i'll try and get it back so that i can lend it to you if you want it. they're so quick and easy to make!!

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  9. Great idea! And G looks super-happy with the final product!

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  10. I'm going to forward this to my DIL to see if she would like me to ruffleize anything for charlotte. Oh, and make some leggings too.

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  11. Great, great idea. My daughter is so tall we often run into the short shirt problem. I need to start ruffle-izing things!

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