Finish Friday for Fabulous Frances

Frances has these purple fleecy pajamas that are much too small, and which she refuses to stop wearing. I’m sure, if you have children, that there is an item or two in your child’s wardrobe with the same sentimental attachment. I’m not sure why she’s so attached to these pajamas in particular. There’s no special story behind them; they’re not particularly beautiful; and they’re three inches too short in the legs.

It was time to take drastic measures: if I was going to get her to stop wearing these purple fleecy pajamas, I was going to have to supply her with new purple fleecy pajamas. And since I had a pile of (cheap) purple fleece with a snowflake pattern on it ($4/metre!) and a pajama pattern ($3 on sale), well, you know … why buy it when I can make it myself?

I hadn’t actually any plans to sew anything on Sunday. I thought I might actually take a weekend day off of the sewing thing. Maybe do some embroidery, instead–which on reflection is a type of sewing, but not a mechanized one. But then Frances came wandering down the stairs in her purple fleecy pajamas with her ankles on full view, and refused to give them up without purple fleecy pajamas in trade. So.

Of course, just because I needed to make a pair of pajamas didn’t mean that  was off the hook from all of the groceries-laundry-dinner-shoveling gauntlet that Sunday generally is. So I did the laundry, shoveled, bought groceries, made dinner, and in between made a set of purple fleecy pajamas.

Super easy pattern. It comes with serging instructions, which is my favourite way to make fleece anything. It also comes with regular instructions for those without sergers, by the way.

Anyway, I serged them, and then–because Frances is Fabulous and I love her so–I sewed the serged seams down to the pajama garments so they would lie flat (if you check most knit garments, including t-shirts and pajamas, they will normally do this on most of their seams, but it was not in the instructions). Since I don’t have a double needle, it wasn’t exactly even, but I figured uneven was better than uncomfortable seams rubbing sensitive skin. I sewed the hems using my lovely new blind-hem foot–which is less lovely with fleece, I’ve discovered, since fleece somehow gets wound up in the back of the foot, but it still worked.

The waist is just the right size. The pant-hems hit the top of her foot. The sleeves extend just over her wrists. The top ends the right distance past the waistband. Which is not something we would have been able to say about store-bought pajamas. Fabulous Frances had a new pair of fleecy purple pajamas to wear to bed Sunday night.

And mama had no energy left for anything else.