After a recent trip to the mall, I have been itching to re-create some color-blocked shorts that I saw for O.  Also this week is Project Run and Play’s design your own fabric challenge so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make a PRP look during KCW. (enough acronyms anyone? 😉 ) I really loved these khaki and green ones, but since I already made green shorts (blog post yet to come), I needed another color. The lower short fabric started out as hot pink capris from my sister’s goodwill pile. I rescued them and dyed them with some brown RIT dye. They ended up this nice maroon color. I could have dyed them again to get them more brown but ended up liking this color and decided to keep it. The khaki fabric is from an old pair of hubby’s pants in the upcycle bin.

I took Dana’s flat front short pattern, marked where I wanted the color block to be, and cut out both fabrics using 3/8″ overlap where they would join for seam allowance. Then I sewed them together, serged the seam, topstitched, and used the resulting piece as the regular pattern piece.

Oliver’s showing off his belly button so you can get a close-up of the top-stitching.

I wanted these shorts to look store-bought so I broke out my topstitching thread and used it for all the seams. I even created a faux fly and some faux pocket stitching. Fancy, huh? I thought so. These shorts were definitely a labor of love. I had to break out the jeans needle and stitch very slowly to get all the thick seams sewn up. In the end, totally worth it to have a pair of quality-made shorts. These babies won’t be falling apart anytime soon!

The tee is the (not-so) Raw Edged Raglan from Sewing for Boys. I used my serger for all the seams and my stretch thread for all the topstitching- So loving that! I also love my current table set-up because I have my serger and sewing machine set up next to each other, and I can easily go back and forth as I am sewing. The gray and white stripe is a jersey knit I picked up at the Fabric Fairy using a gift card, and the sleeves are part of an old tee (the rest of which you will see tomorrow in another shirt!)

The shirt is my first attempt at freezer paper stenciling- so fun! The hardest part was agonizing over what stencil I wanted to do- something cool but not too cheesy. In the end I remembered a free stencil pdf I found on Pinterest and used that. It was so fun to peel off the freezer paper and see the words underneath! Definitely going to be doing more of that in the future.

I am pretty jealous of this shirt and my nod to the mini-me theme is that I actually wish I had one of these in my size! Maybe after all this is finished, I’ll try to make one for myself, and we can really be matching. 😉 Not in the exact same colors of course but the same general idea. I know it’s cheesy but gotta do some matchy-matchy while he thinks it’s cool, right?

Because sometimes the outtakes are too funny not to share.