After making 2 Doris dresses and an Arielle skirt for work I was almost sewed out with sensible makes and needed a quick fix of some funky fabric to get my love for sewing back. Enter the Aladdins cave that is Rachel’s Textile Studio and this little haul!

The fabric is a medium weight Gutermann cotton that softened after I washed it and is pretty much perfect for pyjamas.  I’ve got a fair bit of it left still so may make a summer dress too.

As my lovely little island has finally showed some signs of summer that week I decided to make the pyjama shorts rather than the full leg version. Plus we were going camping in France with friends a couple of weeks later and I had visions of myself looking stylish whilst lovingly tending to the kettle on the camping stove.

(Does anybody else do that by the way? Decide when you’re going to wear the new garment and have little fantasies about it before you’ve even opened the packet?) And why is it so important to look good when you’re doing the 6am sprint from tent to toilet block anyway?

I’m kind of a straight up and down girl with not a lot of difference between my waist and hip measurement so usually have to toss up between choosing a pattern size based on my waist and take the hip seams in loads, or on my hips and grade the waist in.  I was feeling lazy and figured pyjamas can be baggy anyway so took my waist measurement and cut a large out everywhere.

Net result is they sit very nicely and comfortably on my waist and are huuuge everywhere else.  I can literally pull them up to under my bust and hubby rolled around laughing at my “ginormous pants” when he saw them.  But I don’t care, they are pretty much perfect for knocking around a campsite in the morning, which doesn’t really count as being out in public.  That said, if I make these again I’ll cut them out as a medium, then just cut the elastic for the waist to the larger waist measurement and feed that into the waistband.

I finished all the insides using my brand spanking new Janome overlocker, which I’d been very girly and threaded up with 2 different pink threads and 2 white.  I keep turning them inside out to admire the finish, am almost tempted to wear them that way!  (That’s a joke.  Probably.)

The only construction issue was that the leg cuffs were smaller than the leg bottoms of the main body part.  I doubled checked the pattern and I’d cut everything out correctly so can only assume it’s a pattern error and what’s marked as the large leg cuff is actually meant to match the medium body.  I didn’t want to waist fabric by cutting another set of longer cuffs, so resewed the outside leg seam taking it in a bit to make the leg bottoms small enough to allow me to attach the cuff.

And there you have it – a perfectly serviceable pair of pyjama bottoms! I’d intended to add some photos of me in France to complete this blog but forgot that several nights sleeping on hard ground combined with no access to hair dryers makes one look extremely unglamorous, so I’ll spare the World Wide Web that sight.