Christmas fabric all sewn up on Christmas Day

[mechanonymouse]

I got some lovely cotton sweatshirting in a print called Little Witch for Christmas from my mum and managed to convince her to let me have it early. While the pattern is called Little Witches I fell in love with the cats riding broomsticks and knew I wanted to make a snuggly hoody out of it.

I’ve previously made a sweatshirt form Ottobre called the Gray Uniform Hoody but it’s a boys pattern drafted for a slightly different rib cage shape than I have and I wanted a better fitting option. To that end I trialled a girls hoody in a cheap polyester fleece - foul to work with, sheds like mad but makes a nice warm pyjama top.

This is again a pattern from Ottobre kids and meant to made with soft shell. It is intended to fasten with zips on either side of the front raglan sleeve seam but I have sensitive skin and wouldn’t be able to wear a zip against my neck. Instead I drafted an under lap and facing to attach poppers to. On the polyester fleece version I messed up and they ended up as an over lap. From the wearable muslin, I also found I didn’t need two sets of fastenings.

On the finished version I sewed the left front raglan sleeve seam as a standard seam until the under lap began, then faced the front and top stitched the seam on to the under lap until the notch. The hoody then fastens with sewn in poppers. I love the end result but it was a large very directional print that was a hassle to pattern match especially as the fabric was a remnant with a large flaw in the centre of the bottom 30cm of the fabric.


With the leftovers of my Christmas fabric I made a wearable muslin of a pair of tracksuit bottoms. I had two goals

1. It’s cold and dreich here and warm trousers sounded nice to lounge in
2. My go to pyjamas bottom pattern is cut as the XS, the smallest size, and too big.

The resulting trousers are the loudest things ever and I wish I could say the stripy bottoms are to echo the witches stripy legs but we didn’t have enough fabric. The striped pockets are a similar design feature and one front is pieced. There was no attempt at pattern matching, the Little Witch print has a large repeat and the remnant I was working with had a large flaw in the bottom. The striped fabric is from a previous make, so I feel very virtuous in my stash busting.



The pattern is the Remainer tracksuit bottoms from Ottobre 4/2013 in size 170. The crotch curve is lovely fitting nicely on my natural waist front and back. (Modelled on me cause they definitely don’t do that on my mum and normal model’s bum.) They are slightly short, I had intended to cuff them but got lazy as the fabrics behave well enough to hem them successfully.


The pattern calls for 3cm elastic and my local haberdashery only had 1 1/4” elastic which was a tight fit, when I make them again I will either source 3cm elastic or use 1” elastic. I also went off pattern for the waist band elastic diameter. The pattern called for 65cm and I decided to go larger, it now only functions to keep them above my hips and I need to use the tie to hold them on my waist. I would prefer for the tie to be purely decorative and need the band to be the suggested diameter for that to be so.