PJs!

Younger son and I collaborated on making a pair of pajama pants for him to wear. We finished pair #1 the other day. I was teaching myself using a book and he was learning right alongside me.

I found the book "Buckles and Bobbins" at a homeschooling conference. It is written to teach boys to machine sew and includes 'boyish' patterns.




The pants ended up too large for my son, so I'll be tweaking the pattern to customize them, for pairs #2-6. Making those is on my "to do" list. My son wants to use the sewing machine by himself. I let him do a little on this first pair. As we work on the rest of the pairs together I plan to have him do more and more of the work, all of it, not just the machine sewing part.

Below is a photo of his idea to help me. When I was getting pieces mixed up of which was which of the four parts to cut out, he used Post-It notes to label them. Hooray for creative thinking on the fly!



My sons both got to see me struggle to learn to make these pants. While doing this I had to teach myself to do all the basic stuff to the machine from winding the bobbin, fixing tangled up thread, replacing the needle, so on and so forth. I think I experienced every kind of error and problem that can happen when machine sewing and I resolved them all, calmly and without tears. It is good for kids to see that adults struggle to learn also.

In case you're wondering I'm making these from scratch because I can't find decent PJ pants made of cotton. Also I hate that chemical flame retardant that the federal government mandates be on children's pajamas.