TransPacificTextiles

I thrifted about two yards of cloth a few years ago, with a lei and Hawaiian quilt motif and a selvedge that said Trans Pacific Textiles, so my guess was that it was some souvenir cloth, very likely purchased at a Discount Fabric Warehouse store, which would mean there would be a 25% chance it came from the one in Kona I was able to visit back in 2000.

Neat.

Anyway, I decided I absolutely wanted to use it for a breezy summer dress, but not in the same skirt-gathered-to-empire-waist style as the last few I made.  Nah--for this, I absolutely wanted an exaggerated A line!  And of course I had no patterns for that shape.

So, no problem, I just find some to cobble together, and I eventually ended up fusing an early 1990s pullover tank shirt for wovens with a 1970s wrap skirt...and the pockets from the skirt-gathered-to-empire-waist dress.  I forgot to take pictures of the patterns I used,and, at this point, I do not want to take any more pictures of this project.

The combination of patterns blended together just fine, and the shape turned out as I hoped

Dragon Mix

I have a friend who expressed interest in a few aspects of clothing that I realized, hey, those loose dresses I've been making for me?  Would probably work for them.

So I turned to my "these prints coordinate well but I have no idea what to make with them" stash and Simplicity 9153 and made this

Crawly Shorts

I'm not going to call them creepy crawlies, because I happen to like lizards and frogs and bugs and the like, as do many of my friends--I actually used a chunk of this embroidered lightweight denim to make a tote bag for a friend a few years ago.

And then the cloth sat in my stash, untouched, until the kiddo's school had a 'mismatched' dress up day planned, and we dug out this cloth with the intent of seeing if it could be made into a pair of pants.  Turns out there wasn't enough for that, and the school closed unexpectedly that week due to countywide illness.  So the cloth went back into the stash, but only temporarily, until I decided to make a pair of shorts from it, using good ol' Kwik Sew 2544.

And it turned out there wasn't enough to come anywhere near making pants, so hooray for shorts.

 You will not be surprised to learn that this fabric was thrifted, so I have no idea where it's from (but "JoAnn" wouldn't surprise me.)

And this was one of those projects that started easy but quickly turned...I'm not sure.  "Boring" doesn't feel like the right word, but it wasn't something that I rushed to finish--even though I really dislike setting an unfinished project aside to work on something else, this one got set aside for...three weeks...? while I worked on other things (thanks largely to doll friends, some of whom came over for the doll show, and some of whom sent Very Interesting Things, thanks so much!)

And all that was left were the waistband and hems, which I finally did today (after sorting and organizing and, most importantly, putting away a load of doll stuff.)

 My massive laziness on the waistband was not consulting anything but vague memories about the length of elastic needed and just grabbing a bit that was already somewhere in the approximation of the correct length.  It will, y'know, stretch.

It did, though, gather the back so much that the pockets were wrapping around to the back when it was clipped to the hanger, so I laid it out for the detail shots.

 (ended up with a bit of a convocation of frogs around this pocket.)

Despite the way it droops off the hanger,  the hems do align nicely when everything is laid out flat.

 The inside is a mess, but it's a finished mess.

And now that they're finished, it's forecast to be too-cool-for-shorts temperatures for the next week.  He'll wear them someday.