boy sewing

Here's a funny story for you.  A few days before Toby was born I got worried that I didn't have enough warm baby clothes in a newborn size since Anna was a summer baby and all her newborn clothes were short sleeves or singlet suits.  So I waddled on down to the local shopping mall a few days post date and bought some long sleeve full leg bodysuits in a neutral colour.  Which Toby wore a grand total of one time before he grew out of them, being born so huge to begin with and working hard on his Buddha appearance ever since. Seriously, he has put on 1.5kg since he was born and now weighs nearly 6kg - our nickname for him is 'wombat' now!

He's now wearing clothes that Anna was wearing when she was 3 months old, which is unfortunate for him since by that age we started buying clothes of the pinkish kind for Anna and not really good for hand me downs.  So in between breastfeeds (about 2 hours), I managed to churn out six pairs of simple elastic waist pants for him saving myself a fair bit of money and increasing his wardrobe quickly:

I drafted the pattern from a pair of RTW pants that fit him, because I know from experience that the commercial sewing patterns are way too huge when it comes to baby clothes.  And despite my stash being absolutely huge, I had very little in the way of boyish fabrics which is why I had to resort to stripes in various colours ( I can feel a fabric shopping expedition coming on!).  I sewed them mostly using my overlocker, which made it very quick to make them production line style.  I even did a pretty good job in matching the stripes too:

And the little wombat seems to like them, judging by the poses he pulled when I was trying to do his 4 week photo:

The good thing about him being a wombat is that the red minkee jacket I made for him from the fabric I received from the OnlineFabricStore (that I reviewed here) fits him quite well so he'll get some good wear from it for a little while at least!

And yes those pants do match the lining of the jacket - I happened to have a very big piece of that fabric picked up from an opshop sometime ago. In fact I've nearly finished making a top for myself from the same fabric, I wonder if matching mummy and son outfits is as bad as matching mummy and daughter outfits?

A few of you have been asking how I've managed to get any sewing done - simple, I haven't been doing any housework! Ha ha, jut kidding.  I wish that were true but since having Toby the amount of washing and cleaning I have to do seems to have increased exponentially.  However because Toby has the decency to sleep for hours at a time and is happy to sit in his bouncer when awake for long periods of time I get pattern tracing and cutting out done during the day, and at night when his dad is home I palm him off as soon as I've finished feeding him so I can do some sewing for an hour or two.  All of this is totally and delightfully new to me - Anna never slept for longer than 20 minutes at a time and if she was awake she had to be held all the time so I never had a chance to get anything done.  Fingers crossed it keeps up......