Tiny Shirts

Is there anything cuter than baby clothes?

It turns out that baby clothes you've made yourself are even cuter than clothes you might buy at a store. Or maybe they're just more satisfying 😊

I used the free Wee Lap Tee pattern from Patterns for Pirates for these shirts that are a shower gift for a friend. There's also a free pattern for pants and a beanie hat, so you could make a complete outfit for baby if you wanted. I made the three month size and loved the adorable-ness of all the small pieces even before they were sewn together.

The bonus in making baby clothes is that they're so small you don't need much fabric. These two shirts are actually made from three old shirts of mine. The shirts had a couple of small stains, but most of the fabric was still perfectly good and I hated the thought of just throwing them out. A little careful cutting later and the fabric can become something new.

Just look, the board book is almost as big as the shirt! As a side note, Hippos Go Berserk is still my favourite baby book to read. This is my third copy after we wore one out and the replacement vanished after a couple of years 😊 Nathan was very amused to discover I can recite it from memory. We won't discuss how many baby books I could recite...or how quickly I forget things I'm supposed to do if I don't write them down.

I used my serger for these, even though it still kind of scares me. I sewed the seams on my regular sewing machine, then finished the seams on the serger, being careful to keep the seam allowance just to the left of the cutting blade so none of it was actually cut off, since that's the part that scares me, lol. What if I make a mistake and the seam allowance has already been trimmed? How do I fix it then?? That being said, I think that if I make these again I will actually trim the seam allowance a little, especially the shoulder seam, since serging them made them feel a little stiffer and I think that would be less noticeable if the seam allowance were smaller. Maybe. We'll see if I'm right whenever I try it out.

The edge of the seam allowance does look nicer when it's finished, even if my serging skills could still use work.

The shirts aren't perfect, but I'm guessing the new baby won't mind the small imperfections. The most noticeable is the small pleats I had to make in the neck bindings because the raw edge of the binding wasn't caught in the seam. Rather then pick out the whole seam, re-pin and sew again I opted to just pick out a little right at the binding, then push it into the seam and stitch it up. Imperfect, certainly, but it worked!

I'm really having a lot of fun playing around with sewing clothes 😊 As a bonus, clothes are generally very fast to finish, especially when compared to quilts! Sewing these took one evening, though I had all the pieces cut out prior to that. Had I been familiar with the steps of the pattern, it would have been even faster.

If you're interested in learning to make clothes, but scared to start, check out my post Quilters Can Learn to Sew Clothes!

I have quilts I can't wait to finish (and more I haven't even started yet!), but I'll also be planning what my next garment sewing project will be. What will you be sewing next?