Recycling Adult Clothes for Baby Things

Once adults have no further use for their clothes, they may give some of them to the charity shop.  Sometimes, the clothes may be in such bad shape that they just need to go into the fabric recycling waste. But sometimes adult clothes on the throwaway heap may still have some good fabric in them. My husband throws away a shirt once the collar corners have started to curl. If there is usable material, I put them in my stash, until I find a further use for them. (Often to my husband's protests that I already have too much fabric. Is there such a thing???) Often, there will be enough to make little garments for small children. In this post, I'm going to recap on some of the uses I've made of rejected clothes over the past couple of years that have enabled me to fashion new garments for nothing or next to nothing. If any of them strike a chord, there are links to the more detailed descriptions or tutorials.

1. Some baby leggings

A stretchy rib-knit lady's vest gave me just enough material to make a pair of leggings is size 3-6 months. Here's the pattern laid on the vest.

And the finished leggings. Cute! And here's how I made them.

2. A child's T shirt

From this adult T shirt (with patches under the arms showing signs of pilling):

...to this pretty one for a three-year old, which avoided all the worn material:

And here's how.

3. Several baby and little girl clothes from a bed valance no longer needed

Well, these aren't really from unwanted clothes, but they are a good example of recycling. My Mum had a 'make do and mend' philosophy, borne of wartime deprivation (no new fabrics available for years), and I suppose I picked up a lot of this mentality from her.

Here's the old valance. It came from a single bed, and we no longer had any single beds. (Things go full circle - we are considering getting single bunks again for the grand-children!)

I got several garments out of this: a baby dress, which actually used the already gathered part of the valance. I wrote about how I made this in this post about 3 years ago:

And some baby knickers / nappy covers, which I wrote about here:

In between times, there was enough to make the odd baby pillow case, But then this year, I used what was left to make a pair of matching dresses for one of my grand-daughters, now 3, and her new baby sister. I love these! You can find out more about making dresses like these at the bottom of this post.

4. Salopettes for a toddler from a teenager's anorak

This anorak had seen better days. And my little grand-daughter, who was tiny and skinny then, was really in need of some warm trousers that wouldn't ride up her legs when she was in the baby carrier. So I invented some salopettes, using the anorak sleeves to make the main parts of the legs, and the rest of it for everything else.

You can find out how this worked in this post.

5. A pirate costume T shirt

This actually started not from an adult T shirt, but an older child's T shirt that my own daughter had once worn! 

I wanted the stripey fabric to make my grand-daughter a pirate shirt, but not the big Yachting logo on the front. So I turned it back to front, changed the neckline, and added a skull and cross bones applique. You can find out how in this post.

You may notice in the above picture there is a nice pair of pirate trousers, which leads me to my next remake:

6. Pirate costume trousers from a man's striped shirt

Here's a shirt sleeve with the cuff removed, and my favourite toddler pants pattern laid on top. These were intended to be knee length trousers for a pirate, so as you can see, I cut them off above the bottom edge.

And here are the finished trousers. You can find out how I made them in this post.

7. T shirts that no longer fit refashioned as onesies and onesie dresses.

Well, I've done this numerous times. T shirts sometimes shrink (well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it) and are still serviceable but just too small for an adult. The onesie or T shirt part of all of these were made from just such T shirts.

I wrote about these in this post, and this follow-up. 

8. A beach wrap skirt to a little girl's swing top with a back wrap feature 

I didn't take a photo of the beach wrap skirt before I started on it. It was a short skirt with a frilled edge bottom, intended as a cover-up for a swimsuit, which would wrap round the waist and tie round with long ties. It was made of a lycra type fabric so it would dry quickly (and could be stuffed in a bag with beach towels etc. But nowadays, I'm more likely to choose a longer wrap skirt or a wrap dress with some arms - I burn too easily to be prancing around in a short skirt (my husband disagrees - but he doesn't have to wear it).

So here it is, folded in half. And the pattern for my grand-daughters top in size 5 is laid on it. 

I really like my invention here, for a top that has a wrap feature at the back. This was achieved by pretty much doubling up the back. You can read more about it in this post.

Well, that's just a few of the remakes, and I hope will give you inspiration for what can be done to recycle clothes (and household fabrics, too), and give them a new lease of life as children's clothes.