Well, it’s time for a preschool makeover. The kid keeps growing again. I suppose that at 4 feet tall, she still has a fair bit of growing to do, so that’s ok. It does not sit as well with the clothing budget, however.
We’ve been blessed to inherit many clothes from many different families. When my daughter was born, we got clothes from many different little girls, and I had so many that I divided them into a number of boxes of different sizes and gave some of them away. Now, the wave of clothing has slowed to a trickle and we rely a lot on our neighbors.
Unfortunately, it seems like the latest growth spurt has left my daughter without cozy winter pants, unless we want to set a new trend that involves wearing Capri pants in the winter time. This might be a bit hard on the ankles, though.
To this end, I’ve adopted a number of the too-short pants to try out some sewing magic. This will have to be quite magical, because I’m an appallingly bad seamstress. I’d like to turn them into ruffle pants.
Now, I am a frequenter of Etsy, and this is bad for my budget. As I was looking for inexpensive online finds to supplement my daughter’s wardrobe and satisfy her desire for “things that pull up easily and are comfortable,” I stumbled across these pants. Basically, they’re cords, jeans or lounge pants with a strip of colorful fabric at the bottom. If you want to get really fancy, you could give them a flare like bell bottoms. If you want to get really, really fancy, you could also place a ruffle when the regular fabric meets the additional fabric. I am not really fancy. I just sewed up some fancy floral fabric and placed it on the end of the existing pants, overlapping a little. Then I added a fabric patch to the side to make it look like the bottom ruffle was intentional and not a way to cover my daughter’s calves and ankles.
The result is pretty cute, although it does look somewhat purposefully reconstructed. Hopefully these pants will last until a Christmas wardrobe infusion.