Men's shirt to baby jammies

My little guy needed some new summer-weight jammies so I went into the local thrift store after dropping off my donation to see if I could find anything interesting to re-purpose or re-fashion.

I found this men's size large seersucker shirt. What could be better for summer jammies than seersucker in a cute light blue stripe? And the price? Awesome. To buy the fabric at Jo-Ann's would have run me about $7. It's not a lot of savings, but when you have a baby it's enough. And I got to reuse something that was just lying around.

I will admit, to make a set of size 12 month jammies (for my 8-month-old little guy) it did take some creative cutting to make this work. I felt like I was dissecting the shirt; I cut it apart at all the seams so I would have large flat pieces without the extra bulk of seams to get in the way.

I cut the shirt fronts from the sleeves so I could use the hem of the sleeve for the snap placket; no sewing required for that part.

The neck and the sleeves were finished with single-fold bias tape. I'm really starting to love this stuff. It's so much easier to sew it on than to fold over the edges twice, ironing in between, and then sewing.

Here is evidence of my creative cutting. After cutting out the four pieces for the pants I didn't have another piece large enough to cut the back of the shirt from. I had to cut it out in two pieces and then sew them together. As you can see I ended up with half a back with vertical stripes and half with the horizontal stripes that continue on the front of the shirt. I thought it was fun to use the piece with the Ralph Lauren Polo logo on the back.

It was kind of difficult to catch a picture of my little guy wearing his new jammies. Now that he can crawl he just wanted to go, go, go. Here he is in a still moment. (I have to cuff the pants when he's crawling so his feet don't get caught in them. I need to tighten the elastic some more; I wanted to be sure they would fit for a while so they're quite roomy right now.)

My husband thinks the horizontal stripes on the top make him look like a little jailbird. He is guilty of being pretty adorable. All in all, I'm super happy with how these turned out. Having an XL shirt would have made the process easier, but then again, so would having a smaller baby. Either way, these are the perfect summer jammies. I also picked up a linen shirt to transform. Maybe I'll work on that in a few weeks.