For quite a while, I've been sleeping in thrifted T-shirts that had gotten too worn out in everyday use. I'd thrift a shirt, wear it until it started developing holes or other signs of damage, and, if I didn't creatively repair them for continued dressing use, retire them to the pajama drawer. However, since I drastically cut back how much I thrift, my T-shirt supply has dwindled, and the pajama shirts have started more or less disintegrating.
Not too long ago, someone I've known online for ages asked if I'd like some fabric—left over from her clothing sewing projects—that should be good for doll clothes, and I said Sure, Thanks! The parcel arrived and the generous amount of knit cloth was indeed a good weight for doll clothes. The quantity would have taken me years to sew through if limited only to doll use (and probably had a lot passed on to other doll sewing people—in fact, I just sent two huge boxes of doll appropriate fabric remnants off myself); however, a lot of the pieces were large enough to be able to use for ribbing in person-sized sewing projects, so I sorted out those bigger pieces and put them on the large yardage shelves, then crammed the rest into the small yardage knits drawer.
I realized a few days ago that I just might be able to solve the sleep shirt problem with the larger odds'n'ends of the gift knits.
And I did!
The knits are very lightweight and soft (thus the potential for doll use) and also very very stretchy, so, even though these look like sports bras or binders, they do no sort of compression at all.
The person who sent the knits had, I'm pretty sure, made tank dresses from most of these fabrics, so some ends of the fabric had wider reverse scoops from where the armholes had been cut; those areas were what I used for where my own armholes would swoop over into the sides. This put severe limits on what fabrics I could use where, and that made the project a fun problem solving puzzle experience (until it wasn't...)
I used New Look 6068, view B, in a size I originally cut probably 20 years ago. That is not the size I wear now, but, since these fabrics are very stretchy and I plan to never ever wear these shirts in public, the size is fine. I also had to make all of the shirts very cropped, due to the limitations of the fabric remnants, and chose, for several of them, to scoop the neck out a lot, because I wasn't sure how it would feel to have a tight high neckline while sleeping. Oh, and, I scooped out some extra area under the arms, also for comfort considerations.
I started with the widest pieces, a dense jersey knit dark blue that there was enough of to make both halves of the front and back. I even tried to use some of the selvedge as a decorative element at the center front, since there had to be a seam there to make the fabric work anyway.
The rib knit I had to piece, and quite a bit, but its texture helped hide the seams, which I also tried to offset from the front center areas.
I did the construction on the lock stitch machine, with a narrow zigzag, so I could have more thread color options at the seams. I serged all of the seam allowances for a sense of neatness, plus a little extra stitching in areas where my seam allowances were, by necessity, skimpy, due to working with limited fabric. I also zigzagged around a lot of the visible seams, sometimes for decoration and sometimes to keep the seam allowances going the direction I wanted them to go.
Once that was finished and worked for proof of concept, I started seeing what else I could do.
The gray wasn't wide enough to make one of the sides, so I chose to make the back solid and add a contrast panel to the front. I got a little carried away with how much smaller the bands are than the openings they finish, but, again, everything is stretchy enough to still work.
(For the record, I tried most of these on over the second dress here, and the resulting look was rather campy old low budget science fiction, which I enjoyed.)
While I had no problems with the idea of piecing along vertical seams, I wanted to avoid horizontal piecing, both because I felt like horizontal seams might be more likely to get over-stretched and pop,and also because I know the infinite possibilities that open up when I allow myself to do full-blown patchwork piecing, and I did not want that many options for this project.
There was a touch more of the red fabric to play with for length, but this is still much above my waist. I again had to choose which side would be a solid color and which side would be pieced. The result makes me think of superhero Underoos and Mork from Ork.
This one needed both sides pieced. I ended up really liking the color combination here.
Reminder that not only was all of the cloth used for this sent by someone else who had used it for her own projects, but I wasn't even using the full range of fabric she'd sent, due to the way I'd sorted the pieces by size. Part of the fun of this whole project was getting this other person's color choices to work with my aesthetics.
That said, the next one is exceedingly simple, in terms of the color mix. I will note that this is a cooler gray than the very warm, almost ecru, gray used in the peach banded and red tops above. I was able to eke out the front and back entirely from the gray here, and also decided to try a higher neckline, although it's still scooped a bit from the pattern.
Aaannd that was when I realized that, oh, right, a higher neckline required less fabric for the bands, which meant I wouldn't have to cut up and piece together so many parts to try to make enough to go around everything.
Also, at that point, I figured five shirts was probably enough, but I was determined to see if I could get two more out of the remaining fabric. Time for more aggressive piecing!
The shirt above ended up being my favorite, in part because I was able to use the largest piece of the olive green fabric (when I was finished with all of these, I looked at the pieces I'd set aside because they were larger and saw that I have more of that olive green in there—even though I didn't look at it to see how much more, I was happy to see that I did have more.) It also reads as Very 1990s to me, which I think is funny. It definitely doesn't fit me like the skinny teen dEliA*s sweater vest it wants to pretend to be would fit its target market.
So that was six shirts, and I wanted to make one more. There was a lot of the red and dark blue left, but putting those together seemed excessively Superhero™, so I poked around and decided I'd figure out how to use what was left of the two fabrics I liked the most.
I had initially cut the sides from the peach, but, as soon as I sewed one on, I didn't like it. That led to the only stitches picked out in this entire project, then choosing this grayish blue jersey instead. (There are actually three different grayish blue jerseys among all of the fabrics in all of these shirts.) There wasn't enough of the grayish blue to do all of the bands, so I pieced on the peach on the bottom and did the armholes in the grayish blue (off grain, too! but stretchy enough in that direction to work) and the neckband in a peach strip left over from the second shirt.
I also revisited the idea of exposing the selvedges in the center front seam allowance, and in the fabric used for the bands in the first shirt, where I'd also done that.
And that was seven! I did consider going ahead and doing one more, in the red and dark blue, but...bleah, no. This project is done. (But I might see if there's enough fabric to sew that hypothetical sweater vest in my more proper size...)
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