Make a Toddler Robe from a Single Bath Towel

For a little while now, I've been wanting to make Katie a robe. We have this older towel that she seems to love, so I decided to try and make it into a robe for her.

1. Start off with a towel, and a toddler. Katie is 17 months old, and I'm pretty sure that the robe will fit her until she's at least 2. She's currently about 24 pounds and 31.5 inches tall.

I tried to chase after her to get some specific measurements...but it's difficult. I got some basic guidelines, and the end result fit well.

I hemmed and sewed all the edges using a zig zag stitch.

A few tips:
1. Make sure you use a towel that you've already washed. Most towels will shrink a bit, and you probably want to have that happen before you go to all the work.
2. As I've washed the robe a couple of times, I noticed that some of the edges have frayed slightly, but the seams are still holding strong. To prevent this, I guess you could fold them over and sew them down once more.
3. I might also add a couple of loops for the tie, but I haven't done it yet. As is, you end up with a good sized washcloth to go with the robe when you're done, but you could easily trim that and create a couple of belt loops.
4. The towel material is very thick when you're hemming all the seams. I would strongly recommend using a thicker needle--maybe a jean's needle or something similar (I think it's a 16).
5. You could probably get a beach towel and create a similar robe for an older child by scaling the measurements up a bit.

Copycat Shirt

Kayla over at Freckles in April did a post about her wood bead necklace, and she posted this picture:

I decided that I would like to copy the shirt behind the necklace.

However, being somewhat skeptical about my abilities to do so, I failed to take a before picture. It was a basic long-sleeved men's shirt that I got from my local thrift store for $0.33. It looks a lot like this one.

First, I removed the collar and front pocket using a seam ripper, and then sewed up along where the collar was:

I also sewed in some darts in the front and the back to make it more fitted. I can't really tell you how to do it specifically, I just tried the shirt on inside out, and then pinched and pinned equal distances from the buttons in each side. The size of the shirt before will determine how much you have to bring it in. I did the front darts first, and the back darts later.

I next cut off the sleeves so that I could have the material needed for the ruffles. The one in the picture had long sleeves that were rolled up. I measured how long I wanted my ruffle to be (about 11.5 inches), and then added a couple inches to that measurement so that it would be ruffly. I ended up cutting off about 14.5 inches of sleeve.

The cut sleeve looked really lame all by itself, so I cut the cuff off of the bottom of the sleeve that I had removed. My bicep happens to be larger than my wrist, so I needed a bit of extra material to make the sleeve work completely, so I cut the collar that I had removed in half, and then pinned and sewed the pieces together so that they would fit around my bicep. Then I pinned the sleeve to it (sleeve right-side-out, cuff inside-out), and then sewed all around. The second time, I pinned things and sewed wrong, and was forced to use my seam ripper to fix it...so you shouldn't do that. This was the result:

When taking a picture of yourself from below, be sure to crane your neck upward to avoid showing off multiple chins.

Then I took the sleeve parts and cut them in half. Then I used the longest stitch on my sewing machine, and gathered them until I liked it. Then I pinned and sewed them to the shirt.

Then I took about 50 pictures of myself looking like a total dork. Here's one that didn't turn out blurry, even though I look grumpy:

Sometimes cropping helps?

Well, nope.

Maybe once Nate gets home I'll force him to take a few pictures of me that look less like I took them myself.