More about this blog

 I'm a grandma who loves making clothes for my grandchildren. That's all. This is not a commercial site, there is nothing you can buy on it. I do make some suggestions and provide links to other web sites where you can get free patterns. Some of these people do also have patterns for sale, but I neither endorse nor preach avoidance of these.  I also provide some simple patterns of my own. Soon there will be pictures of my favourite projects here to help you navigate to the best bits. In the meantime, use the tabs or the search box. There are specific tabs for making babies' and children's dresses, and things with legs (shorts, trousers, pants, leggings, PJs etc), plus a more general Make Baby /Child Clothes tab for other sorts of garments (e.g. skirts) and mixed (e.g. PJs with pants and a top). There is a list of UK on-line fabric supplers to help UK readers, now that so many physical shops are no longer with us, which I try to keep as up to date as possible. There are also tutorials on how to make children's clothing and accessories (dining room harness, playmat and gym, for example). I write up some reviews of free PDF patterns (and also provide some of my own). So enjoy the web site!

What goes around comes around

 Most readers will know I have 4 delightful granddaughters, now aged between almost 4, and 7. I've been making clothes for them for the past 7 years, and some of the clothes have been handed down multiple times. (Although each child has had a lot of their own clothes, too.) The project list has reached 310 items, and still growing. However, the inevitable has happened: some of the clothes are now too small even for the youngest. The real baby clothes went some time ago. But all the toddler and age 2-3 clothes are now also being reluctantly acknowledged as too small, and hence not suitable for taking along when the family moves into their new home. There's no-one left to pass these on to!

So I'm going to indulge myself here by looking at some of these clothes in their heyday.

First, here is Ada in some of the things I made for her - sadly now outgrown. See if you can spot them in the heap above.

You can see how she loves to pose!

And now, here are her older sister and cousins in some of the clothes she later wore - also in the heap above!

 

Sad to see these little clothes go. Someone suggested to me I should save them for the great-grandchildren - but as the oldest is only 7, by the time any great grandchildren come along I'll probably be pushing up daisies! So they will have to be recycled or turned into a quilt.

STOP PRESS: I found a close friend's granddaughter of 2 and a half would be visiting at the same time as us. So I took the larger ones with me and they were very gratefully accepted. The rest are going soon to the refuge.

 

Here's some of the recycling, giving these clothes a new lease of life:

More swing tops!

The Swing Tee tops I had made for Jane and her little sister last summer had gone down so well, that the free pattern from Life Sew Savory was the obvious place to start for Jane's new tops for her birthday. I did a full review of the Life Sew Savory pattern in my earlier post, but I've taken even more pictures now of the making of these two new ones. The one on the left is as the pattern, while the one on the right has had the sleeves extended a little.

For more pictures of making up this great pattern read on.

Woven patterns for boys

I often see people commenting that there are so many great patterns in woven fabrics for girls, and hardly anything for boys. There are even a lot of free ones, if you know the right places to look. I did a post recently on designers with woven fabric patterns, and it's quite true that a lot only make for girls or women. However, it's possible to find enough patterns for boys, even some free ones, to be able to make a great capsule wardrobe, at least for younger boys. With all free patterns, there may be a limited size range in the free version, other sizes often being available as paid for patterns. In this post, I'll look at woven options for paid-for patterns from indie designers for boys, and then I'll move on to what you can find that's free.

Note that in this post, I'll be looking just at digital patterns that can be made in woven or non-knit fabrics, because that's what seems much harder to find. And I haven't considered paper patterns from the Big Five traditional pattern producers.

Pattern designers who have woven patterns for children

It is getting increasingly difficult to identify independent pattern designers who offer woven patterns as part of their offerings. It seems almost every day a new designer will emerge with a number of knit patterns - perhaps they are easier to design, or more forgiving in fit, and they have become very popular in the last 10-15 years. But many people still want to make children's clothing with some of the lovely woven fabrics that are around, me included, so I did some research to try and identify designers that do offer woven patterns. (I'm not including the traditional 'Big Five' or however many there are - they do all do woven paper patterns but you probably know them already. I'm talking about people who provide digital patterns on-line for you to print.) If you are specifically looking for boys patterns, there's also more information here.

One of my grand-daughters loving her woven cotton dress

Tricks and tips for sewing knits on a sewing machine

I do feel cross about this post. I'd finished writing it, went to publish it - and whoosh, it vanished, with no retrieval possible. (Thank you, Blogger software.) And I've had to start again from scratch. So it may get updated as I remember things I had included before, that now I can't remember.

Complaint over. My introduction will be much the same though. I have many years sewing experience, and when I started sewing, knit fabrics didn't really exist. So I learnt to sew using woven fabrics, and came to knits rather late in my sewing career. When I started, I fervently hated them. I still prefer using woven fabrics, but I've learnt a few tricks and tips over the years that have enabled me to accept that often my grandchildren want clothes that are best made with knits. And to sew them with pleasure (but did I mention I still prefer sewing with woven fabrics?)

In this post, I'll share what I've learnt to make sewing with knits easier. And I should add that I don't have (and couldn't afford) an overlocker / serger. People say knits are much quicker with an overlocker. But many of my tips are useful even if you have one. Lucky you!

More Movie Night Knit pyjamas

I've already used (and reviewed) the free Movie Night Pyjamas pattern from Sew a Little Seam. So I shan't write a detailed description on the latest set, you can read my full review here. So this post will mainly just be some further pictures of making a set of these knit pyjamas, this time, size 8 for Rose's 6th birthday.

This Year's Christmas Dresses part 3 - Tropisch dress

The last of this year's Christmas dresses was for little Ada, 3. Ada is destined to be the hand-me-down girl, with an older sister and two older girl cousins. However, this does mean she has a lot more clothes than the others ever had, becuase she has all of theirs, and some of her own too! And she loves the clothes she gets that Grandma made. Nonetheless, for Christmas, I thought it only right that she had her very own, never previously worn dress. I wanted to use the same fabric that I had used on the skirt of her cousin Rose's dress. It's a pretty 100% cotton fabric with a design of tiny bows. This makes it suitably Christmassy, but not exclusively so. 

For this dress, I wanted to try another new pattern that I'd found (new to me, that is). It's called the Tropisch dress, and it's an A-line / shift style - I've frequently mentioned that I think an A-line pattern is one of the most versatile there is. To find out where to get this free pattern in sizes 3-6, and how I adapted it to make Ada's dress, read on.

This year's Christmas Dresses - Part 2 - the asymmetric one

 With 4 new Christmas dresses to make, I got started early. With no idea as to whether I'd even be able to see my grand-daughters for Christmas, I wanted to get them out early rather than treating them as an extra Christmas present. So the last one was delivered on December 4th. For that one, I used a new (to me) free pattern, so this post will also be a bit of a pattern review.

Asymmetric skirts

For one of my Christmas dresses, I wanted to try an asymmetric skirt (shorter on one side than the other) with a full length underskirt. But before I made a mess of the expensive material I'd bought for this, I thought I'd try a toile - ideally a wearable one - I don't like to waste any fabric! This shows more or less what I was aiming for (below is the finally finished dress in the more expensive fabric).

In this post, I'll tell you how I went about designing the skirt by making my wearable toile. I've written another post about the dress pictured.

2020 Christmas dresses Part 1 - The first two, using Simplicity 9379

As in previous years, I made Christmas dresses for all the girls. Sadly, we were not able to spend Christmas together due to lockdown. But at least they had something to wear for our Zoom calls! First, here are the two dresses I made using Simplicity 9379. for Rose (5) and Fleur (7). You can read about the other dresses in this post - the assymetric dress, and in this one, the red A-line dress. 

More towelling wraps

Over the past few years, I've made simple towelling cover-ups for my grand-daughters - just something they can wear over a wet swimming costume to play around the pool. If that's what you want, you might like to check out these other posts for how to make really simple and quick cover-ups. 

New beach cover-ups for hot summer

Summer cover-ups and beach wraps

How to make a summer cover-up

However, you'll note those are all 'summer' cover-ups. When I started this post, two of my grand-daughters had restarted their swimming after lockdown, in an open air pool. But by this time it was winter, down to about 11 degrees centigrade, and with the changing rooms not open, the only choice was to change or wrap up on the pool side in a biting wind.

Something urgently was needed, and I threw together these two new hooded towelling wraps to cover them up, with the idea being that they could get changed underneath them. Here's one cheeky monkey in her towelling robe. It does button up at the neck, but she wanted to play rather than model.

Swim Robes - Pattern review and additional tutorial

Needing some quick swim cover-ups for two of my grand-daughters, I had made some simple ones out of towelling (see this post) . However, they weren't really going to be warm enough for the coldest part of winter, what with having to change outdoors. And in timely fashion, I found a Facebook post from Laura Bolwell of Designed for Daisy, with information about a pattern and tutorial she had designed for a three-layer swim robe. Her pattern was very reasonably priced on Etsy, so I hastened off to buy it, and set about making not just two robes for those two granddaughters, but 4, for all 4 of them.

As a reviewer on Etsy pointed out, this is not a project for complete beginners, but in the course of making 4, I learned some tricks to make it easier, so I'm sharing what I learned here. Note that this review and my tutorial will only help you if you have bought Laura's pattern and tutorial.

Some great ideas for children learning to sew (or adults!)

I am so often asked for ideas for things that can be made by children, or indeed, adults, who want to learn to sew, that I thought I should write up some of them. Here, I will be focusing on children, but many of the projects I suggest are equally appropriate for adults. There are one or two ideas here for things that can be hand-stitched - well, almost anything can, it may just take longer! But I would almost always suggest that children learn first to do some hand-stitching before attempting to use a sewing machine. That way, they will learn some techniques which will always stand them in good stead.

Of course children can be different ages and in different circumstances when the situation arises. It's different teaching a five-year-old from a ten-year-old. However, I'm not going to offer any advice about what age is appropriate for a child to use a sewing machine, or what machine to use - you know your child best. I personally think simple is better to start with. You might want to get a guard for the machine, though, especially if the child is young.

Constructing a sewn item can also teach several skills: mathematics, to calculate sizes and seams etc; design; following written or video instructions; taking care of safety; and of course fine motor skills. And there can be so much satifaction at producing a usable, wearable, or fun item.

So read on for some ideas that may work for you, whether you are teaching a young relative to sew, or students at a school.

Easy Skirts - Part 3 Flared and part circular skirts

 I've already told you about two other types of skirts that are pretty easy to make, without a pattern, i.e. gathered skirts, and circular skirts. This is a fully circular skirt. 

This is a type of flared skirt - it is a smaller fraction of a circle, rather than a complete circle.

There are several reasons why you might opt for a part circle. So in this post, I'll explore those, and show you an easy way to make them.