75% Wrong Shorts

 I don't like wearing white...or brown...and I don't like the idea of printed plaid on wovens in general, as much as I do love plaid.

But I do love plaid.

I'd had some "almost black but nope look closer! it's dark brown" and white sturdy cotton printed glen plaid for ages.  It had been set aside to be donated, but I decided to keep it and make an effort to use it.  I thought maybe I'd make a bias-cut A-line skirt but decided instead to use this not-quite-my-style fabric to make a test version of Butterick 4703 in a non-stretch fabric to see how it fits.

I know I could have been a lot more casual in how I cut and constructed this, but...I wasn't.  So!  Pattern matching it is!

Shorts!

 Going to be up-front about this project: like the first newsboy cap I made last year, the idea to make this was heavily influenced by something I choose a lot for my character in Animal Crossing--a pair of dark denim shorts.

I've had this vintage Butterick 4703 for years--not exactly sure how vintage it is, since it's from the era when Butterick patterns didn't include copyright dates anywhere, but I'd say it's from the very early 1980s

I had some denim left over from a pair of pants I made for the kiddo a few years ago--definitely not enough for more pants for anyone, but it turned out to be just enough for these shorts (length determined entirely by the available amount of cloth.)

They're really nothing like the ACNH shorts, but there's a lot in life that's not much like Animal Crossing, so that's fine.

Blue Cord Shorts

 When I got KwikSew 3854, it was for view A (shorter version)

When I looked up reviews of the pattern, I discovered that view B was what most people wanted out of it, some to the point of being...ah...very disparaging of view A.  This did serve to make me maybe possibly consider making view B at some point, but determined to make view A first.

Screaming Loud Shorts

You should have a good idea about the kiddo's taste in clothes at this point, so you know why I had the idea to ask him if he'd like a pair of shorts made from an incredibly loud print that was in the friend's relative's destash

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.

Cool Cat

Another pair of Obnoxious Shorts™ for the kiddo!

I let him pick out several prints at JoAnn in the beginning of the summer, and I'm slowly making things from them--first the cash shirt, now...this

Yes, another Kwik Sew 2544--it goes up to kid size 14, so we should have a few more years of use out of it.  For now, I can still squeeze a pair of long shorts (longer than the pattern expects) out of  one yard of a directional print.

Barely.

 This print has a wide selvedge, and there's a bit of it visible on this pocket, although the other side

is fine.  Relatively.  I didn't have enough cloth to be able to be in any way selective about what cat landed where, so there's this really close repeat here.  (This is why I like to pattern match across center front seams when at all possible, just to avoid repeats like this.)  I folded a bit of width out of the pockets to get them to fit on the bits of cloth they were cut from, too.

Fortunately the print on either side of the fake fly front is not as annoying

There's one cat with a purple collar, so I decided to use purple thread.  Why not?

The same cat ended up accidentally almost pattern matching on one part of the back seam curve, too

so she's definitely the star.


The cuffs were serged--just to give me a reference for depth--and turned twice before being stitched

I thought they looked a bit long on him, but he didn't say anything,and they'll probably seem significantly shorter by the end of the school year.

(This was the only picture that wasn't a blur of movement.)  He has several shirts with realistic cat prints, so he should be able to get a lot of use out of these shorts!

(And I have a small amount of the cat print left...which is probably going to become some bit of alarmingly loud doll clothes, because that's what I do...)

Force Shorts

This is another thing I made a while ago but hadn'r blogged--the only reason I'm doing it now is because I want to get the pattern of of my desk (it was only on my desk to remind me to blog it...)

Anyway.

I thrifted Butterick 5090 a while ago, thinking only of using the kid size coat to make something for the kiddo.  Who, it turns out, was already too large for the kid sizes included in the pattern.  I mean...that didn't actually stop me from using the smallest adult size as the base of a jacket for him.

A very nice person has sent me a lot of cloth, including a few bits intended for the kiddo, including about a yard of Clone Wars Prequel era Start Wars print.  The kiddo, though...well, yes, he knows and watches Star Wars stuff, but Star Wars is nothing special to him.  It's just...there.

So I decided I'd use that bit of cloth to eke out a pair of pajama shorts for me, using the pants pattern part of Butterick 5090, and here they are

Pockets!  They're big enough for the 3DS

And near pattern matching!  That was, if I remember correctly, unintentional, and, with how little cloth I had to work with, something I didn't even think was possible.

The cloth has a lot of printing flaws, but that's fine for pajamas.

The accidental near pattern matching continued on the back, too.  So...uh...yay.

Where's the Fire?

Certainly not here, because it took...ah...a month...before I finally fixed the uneven leg lengths on this pair of Obnoxious Shorts™

Obnoxious Shorts™

The last days of school were approaching, with Field Day being a big event for the kiddo, and he'd suddenly decided he was A-OK with the idea of wearing shorts.

He's also quite keen on the idea of loud prints.

Well.