Pull out your sewing machine this summer and make your kids easy to sew pajama shorts.
Every year for Christmas I sew my kids a few pairs of pajama pants. Pajama pants are a surprisingly easy sewing project and they are great for beginning sewers – or just really bad sewers like me!
Now that it’s summer and the air conditioning is on, my kids were still trying to wear their winter pajamas to bed. I sew the pants out of flannel and they love the softness of it. I decided to see if I could just cut the legs off my favorite pattern to make shorts. It totally worked!
I took my kids to the fabric store to pick out fabric for their summer pajamas. I tried to get them interested in cottons but they kept heading right back to the snuggle flannel. The flannel is super cheap when it’s on sale so I was all for it.
They each picked out three different fabric patterns and I bought a yard of each. It turns out that a yard will probably make 2 pair of shorts, though, so you really only need about a half of a yard for one pair of shorts.
It’s really important to wash the fabric before you sew with it. You want to make sure that it shrinks, if it’s going to shrink and to just get out any dust and dirt from being in the store. To make sure we got out all the dirt and grime, I used NEW all free clear OXI booster.
Once the fabrics were washed, dried, and squared off, it was time to cut out the shorts. You can use any pair of shorts your child has as a pattern, but I used Taylor’s Pajama Pants pattern.
I only printed the first two pages of the pattern and cut the leg off just under where the paper ended. But the shorts were a tad too short so next time, I’ll cut the pattern out to the 6-12 month length to give me a little more room to work. Just follow the instructions on the pattern. The hardest part is getting the elastic in the waistband.
And that was it! Within about half an hour, I had a pair of pajama shorts ready to go.