Sewing For Boys

You know, its kinda hard to sew for boys. I mean, the pattern options are very limited and while you could probably find some cool vintage patterns there's no guaranteeing that your boy will wear them. While Simon loves his WoW shirt, he doesn't wear it often because its a button down, and that's too fancy for school.

So, I asked him what kind of shirt would he actually WEAR to school. He says "NARWHALS!" (do a google search, they are a real thing). So I pulled up Spoonflower and did a search for narwhals. There are way more options now than their used to be. But at the time we settled on this one:

You can buy it here.

So for the shirt I used a vintage 70's raglan t pattern. Sorry, no link at the moment. When the fabric came it it was much more purple than expected. Which was fine, cause it matched his stuffed Narwhal I got him for Christmas.

This was the "try on" phase, complete with Dr. Dandy (cause he has a monocle and mustache). I was apparently not fast enough because he promptly ran upstairs "for bed' and then wore it to school, and then Grandma's cause she picked him up before I could pry it off of him. Once I finally got it back it had to be washed. Cause woof... boys are stinky. I added contrast bands to the arms and then self fabric to the bottom. Both needed more length anyway.

As an aside, Spoonflower's organic cotton knit is amazing and worth the price. The only thing I can complain about is the fading of dark colors.

Later I made a pair of sweatpants. I'm glad construction of these are fairly straight foward because I'd had a pretty epic meltdown after finding a dead chipmunk in the kids' rooms. That's one in each.  OHGODEEEWWWW.  There was a lot of screaming and yelling about the state of their rooms, making the kids cry, my husband fairly silent and "helping" them clean* and my roommate left the house. My roommate never leaves the house.

All that to say, I constructed those bad boys while heavily medicated. If this were a game I would have gained a skill level.

And, thanks to the wise words of Twitter Sewcialists, I saved the next thing for later.

Constellation curtains!  This fabric is the perfect curtain fabric. Seriously. The designer really thought this through. Again, spoonflower, and you can get this here in two colorways. These were also super easy. I uses every single bit of this fabric, NO WASTE!  And because it was such an easy project I decided to use some glow-in-the-dark fabric paint I had lying around to paint the constellations themselves.

This is the nook, where we just turned the old fish tank table into a hamster table. Next up is covering it with some vinyl for easy cleaning.

All these things seem to have made Simon a very happy kid. I could tell that he was feeling left out with the amount of things I make for Felicity (because.. hello, girls clothes! Seriously, this is why defining what we can wear by gender needs to go away).

So, that's that. I think I'm done here, but gotta go tally up the Sewcialist votes. Tell me, what do you sew for boys?

Oh, and before I forget, here's the Narwhal Song.


*Clean is a somewhat relative term here. We actually did a lot of cleaning this weekend but you can't tell because the living room is currently the laundry staging area and the carpet looks like it hasn't been vacuumed in weeks. Except it was vacuumed four days ago.