The Cat Pajamas (plus Mice on Bikes!)

With both girls away at camp for a couple of weeks, I spent some time thinking about what to send in their care packages other than food. I bought a couple of Lizzy House Catnap fabrics awhile back specifically for p.j. shorts and decided to sew them up to send to camp. Cat faces for my cat lover Jane and mice on bikes for Kate, because why not? They are so dang cute!

I used the same pattern from Stitch magazine (Summer 2012) that I did for their last batch of sleep shorts. The pattern is in women's sizes and downloadable from the site, but does not include any directions. The directions can be found in the magazine, which I do have somewhere on my shelves. But because I am disorganized and too lazy to search for it, I went ahead and sewed without the directions because I'm crazy like that. No, really, I have made so many pairs of p.j. pants and shorts and they all go together pretty much the same way so I just went for it.

Because the girls are away and I can't get a good waist measurement, I decided to make these with drawstrings instead of elastic/faux-bow waistbands. I figure that I can always add elastic later if they want it. Before I sewed the waist casing, I made a buttonhole on each side of the center seam for the threading the drawstring and tying the bow. The drawstrings were made by sewing two 2" widths of fabric together and then pressing the long piece of fabric so that the raw edges are encased in the center and topstitching the tie closed, giving me a very long 1/2" wide piece of fabric. (Does that even make sense? I think you know what I mean. Well, I hope you do!) Once I threaded the tie through the buttonholes, I pulled the ends even, gathered the waist to what I thought looked like a reasonable fit (a.k.a., I winged it!) and then tied the bow. Once the bow was in place, I knotted its tails and cut the excess drawstring off on an angle. Easy, peasy and very much flying by the seat of my pants. I did leave the drawstrings on the long side figuring that we can cut them shorter if needed. Look at me thinking!

Each pair (one women's size S, the other women's size M) was cut out of a yard of fabric so these really are a easy and good stash-busting sew. Fast, too - each pair took about an hour and a half and I do know that assembly line sewing a bunch goes much faster than that.

So yeah, you guessed it. I've got some more fabric ready to be cut.