'Spring cleaning'

I'm doing a progressive spring clean of our house.  It started with the boys toys, and was originally born out of necessity, as there was no way that the birthday and Christmas presents could fit in the house otherwise.  I'm now picking off shelves/drawers at a time, and this week I tackled some of my clothes.  I'm trying to balance between what'll [hopefully] fit in 6-12 months time, what really should be binned, and what could be re-configured / should be given away.  Yesterday afternoon I tackled my sleepwear drawer, and turned a tank top I've never been that keen on into another pair of pants for the Newbie.  I used Rae's pattern again, with some adjustments...

Pattern:  Rae’s Basic Baby pant

Materials:  

A tank top of mine

Modifications:  

One of my goals for the next year or so is to begin to see patterns as a starting point - to look beyond the illustrations provided and make each garment 'my own', rather than simply sewing them as drawn.  These pants are a simple way to start!  They're also a starting point for getting a bit more comfortable with knits, which's another of my goals.

As with the previous pair of pants, I used the bottom hem of my top as the hem of the pants, doing away with the need to hem them separately, and added the length of the hem (ie. I lazily lined up the bottom of the pattern piece with the bottom of the T-shirt).  

Ribbon

I used some ribbon we'd been given around a present for the Newbie to decorate the bottom of the pants, tying a bow at the side of each leg, and sewing it down before sewing the inside leg seam.  I also used a little on the pocket, and the rest for the waist drawstring.

Waist

I took a bit of inspiration from the Kinderboy's bathers for the waist of the pants, switching the elastic for a drawstring.  I created a break in the centre front seam from a point around 2.5cm from the top to around 4cm from the top of the pants (see blury photo below):

I then stitched around the full waist casing, without leaving a gap for the insertion of elastic.  When I'd finished I threaded a ribbon/elastic combination through the waist via the opening I'd created, tying it at the centre front.  I used around 30cm of ribbon on each end of a 35cm long piece of elastic.  This gives the flexibility of an elastic waist, but will also effectively allow me to let out the waist of the pants as she grows.  I stitched through the pants and the elastic at the centre back to stop the drawstring being pulled all the way through the pants (the ribbon/elastic combo is also longer than the waist of the pants, so that the ends of the ribbon won't get lost inside the casing either).

Pocket

I used an offcut to create a pocket for the back of the pants.  No science to it I'm afraid, I just noticed that some of the offcuts looked a bit 'pocket-shaped', trimmed one, gathered top and bottom, then stitched it on (the top of the pocket is the bottom of my original top, meaning that no hemming was required).