Play Pants.

These had been sitting on my ironing board in a state of partial completion for several weeks - since KCW, in fact. Another pair of After School Pants for Maggie, this time in gray twill and lined in soft flannel for the chilly winter days we have in store.

Maggie and Joe like to pile the couch high with blankets and pillows, push the coffee table up to it, and use it as a kind of launching area. Joe calls it a "couch mountain." The kids love to climb up on the coffee table and then hurl themselves into the pile of softness. I love watching my kids turn ordinary objects into toys and fun adventures. It's probably not the safest activity, but that's why it's so fun!

Maggie can be pretty tough to photograph normally, but she's especially busy and blurry when she's running around, trying to keep up with her brother, and having a ton of fun!

This is a great basic-but-not-boring pants pattern. True to their name, they make great play pants for running around in after school, or if you're too young for school, all the time!

I decided to topstitch every seam with light green thread, for a rugged look. This ended up being more difficult than I anticipated, because I'm having a little trouble with my machine! The bobbin thread wants to bubble and blob up at the beginning of every seam. As a result, the topstitching isn't perfect and it took forever.

As mentioned in my last blog post, I recently took my bobbin case apart and cleaned and oiled it, hoping to address this issue, but it didn't seem to work. I am still tinkering here and there thinking that maybe I can troubleshoot it, but it's possible I need to bring it into the shop. Good thing I kept my old machine as a back-up for emergencies, huh? (Steve tried to talk me into selling it, but I just couldn't do it.)

I didn't match up the yoke seams perfectly, and the topstitching really makes that obvious! But at that stage, struggling with my machine, I just wasn't in the mood to try to redo anything. Oh well, they are cute pants and very practical and will get tons of wear.

I lined the pants in a light green toile printed flannel. I just made a separate pair of pants, minus the pockets and topstitching, and inserted them wrong sides together into the gray twill pants. Then I treated the two fabrics as one for the waistband, and pressed the hems on each layer and topstitched them together so that the contrast fabric shows when you cuff the pants.  

Oh yes, there is my photogenic Maggie right there!

Some of you may remember Maggie's little top. It's a Class Picnic Blouse that I made for Maggie way back in March! This is another example of how Maggie can still wear most of her 6-12 month sized items even now (to be fair, I did add a little extra length to this blouse when I made it). But I really love this pattern, and want to make a dress from it soon. I love it in gingham with piping so much I am tempted to do another version in the same style! But next time, if I do the yoke on the bias, I will stabilize the neckline with a little twill tape to avoid the stretching out you can see here.

Well, I am slowly working through the WIPs in my pile. I still have a couple more, in addition to some longer-term projects like quilts. But I've made quite a bit of progress.

Wait a minute ... where is Maggie?

Peek-a-boo!