Boy clothes – they are a bit harder than girl clothes.  With girl clothes you have various lovely patterns for different kinds of tops and dresses, skirts, pants, gauchos, leggings, etc.  With boy clothes you have pants and shirts.  Not much variety there.  One pattern company I love for their boy clothes is Ottobre.  They are in the form of a catalog and you have to trace the patterns from an enclosed pattern sheet, which looks somewhat akin to the flight patterns of the entire USA.  Just a little confusing, but do-able.  Plus, for around $15 an issue you get lots of boy, girl and baby patterns so they are useable for quite a while and great when you have boys and girls.  Somehow two of my pattern books were recycled last year…after having them shipped from Finland since you can’t find them here.  I’m not naming names as to who did this, but you know who you are. 😉

Since I have one left – the SUMMER one, I tried to see what they had for their boy stuff.  One of the winter ones had these great pants for boys.  *elaborate sigh*  Since I’m just using fleece right now to make him some warm clothes, I used a t-shirt pattern with a curved raglan sleeve and just elongated the sleeve length to fit.  I drew the front pocket and pants pockets, which are lined pieces.  Boys need pockets to carry their treasures.  I used two different patterns for the pants.  The blue One has 4 pieces for both the fronts and the backs, and that seemed like overkill when they were all the same color.  You can’t really tell.  The black one has just two pieces, so that worked much better.

The appliques required a little special attention.  Fleece is synthetic, which doesn’t respond well to high heat.  You may notice a slight iron outline on the back of the black outfit.  Learn from my mistakes LOL!  I had to make sure when I applied them to not go on the non-appliqued surface.  I forgot to use applique paper/tissue underneath while I was sewing on the appliques, too, so the stitching is a bit stretched dang it.  Silly me.

Kailan was VERY excited to see I made him his clothes with his bikes and dragons.  Especially since he loves his “soft pants”.  I made these about a month ago and he loves to wear them.  The first time he wore his dragon outfit to daycare he said his friends “loved” them.  Yeah, dragons are cool. 🙂

Of course, who doesn’t love fleece, too??  If I worked at home I would wear them from sun up to sun down.  Unfortunately my sewing machine did not love the black fleece, which seemed the softest of the bunch, since I had much skipped stitching and broken threads.  At least I just had to hem them on the sewing machine, since the serger did fine with it.  It was still frustrating though.

This past weekend I also replaced the zipper in his winter jacket.  This is winter #2 for his jacket so it apparently couldn’t deal with the stress.  That zipper sure wasn’t going to fall off, though.  I had to rip through 3 seams to get it off.  That was the hardest part of replacing it.  Of course, I had to venture into the fabric store to get the zipper…and it would have been cheaper to just buy him a new coat. 😉  Oh well!

Oh, and go check out New Green Mama’s new etsy shop.  She has some uber cute stuff mostly made from recycled fabric.  I love seeing those types of projects – green AND cute!