Upcycled Toddler T-shirt Pajama Pants Tutorial

Recently I have decided that I need to learn how to use my sewing machine. I have been doing hand embroidery since I was a child and my grandmother taught me how to cross stitch and hand embroider. I have been trying to come up with projects that are simple to start with and that will not matter much if it doesn't look perfect. I have also been on a kick of using recycled clothing to make new articles of clothing or accessories. I can achieve a few goals by doing this, first is to reuse clothing we are no are longer using and second is I can practice sewing with material that it will not be a big deal if I screw it up.

So, my first project is a pair of 5T pajama pants from a large womens t-shirt that was in the throw away pile. I wish that I had taken a before picture of the t-shirt but for some reason I did not. First thing that I did was lay my shirt out flat on my cutting mat and grabbed a pair of my daughters pajama pants to use as a pattern. I then took the pants and folded them in half as shown. This is what I layed on top of my shirt to trace my pattern. I think I did this the difficult way so I had to cut four leg pieces and seam on outside and inside.

The next picture is what my leg pieces looked like after I had them cut out. I cut them so that the hem at the bottom of the t-shirt was the hem at the bottom of my pants legs. After cutting out all four of my leg pieces I begin pinning them together with the two right side pieces facing each other. I pinned all the way up the long side and up to the crotch cut on the other side as shown below. You will need to do this to both pants legs. Than I was ready to sew!!!

 

I refered to my sewing machine manual to determine what kind of stitch, stitch size and tension that was recommended for a stretchy knit fabric. My sewing machine is a Janome and they recommended that I use the zig zag stitch C with a stitch length of 4 and the tension between 2-5, I chose 4. All of these settings seemed to work just fine for the tshirt material. Once I had all my settings figured out I was ready to sew up the sides of my pants. The next picture is my finished legs, each leg only took about 5 minutes to sew up the two sides.

Now that I had my two legs I was ready to sew the two together!!I began by pinning the two legs together leaving a 1/4" seam allowance and sewed one side than the other. This is what my pants looked like after sewing my legs together.

Now I am was ready for the waistband. I folded in the top 1/4" all the way around and then folded it in again 3/4 of an inch this time and I used a 3/4 elastic waistband. I had some difficulty since this was t-shirt material getting the waistband to stay down even with ironing so I used to some spray starch and then ironed and it worked perfect.

I then used straight pins to mark along where I wanted to sew. I used the zig zag stitch again but I think it would have been better if I had used a straight stitch. In order to sew around the waist I removed the arm from the sewing machine and sewed around leaving a gap at the end to allow for room to put my elastic in place.

In order to determine the length of the elastic I needed I measured my daughter's waist and subtracted 1" from this measurement to allow for stretching. Once I the correct length I attached one end of the waistband to a safety pin and pulled it through the waistband.

Once my elastic was in I took the safety pin off and sewed the two ends together with a zig zag stitch again and then sewed my waistband shut.  I then had a completed pair of upcycled 5T pajama pants from a shirt that was going to be given away!!

Happy crafting!!