Upcycled smock.

A couple of years ago, I made Sophie a romper from an upcycled denim shirt I found in a bunch of stuff my mother's neighbour left behind when she went home to South Africa.  There were actually two of these shirts in the bag - I completely forgot about the second one, and stumbled across it a week ago when I was starting to clean my room (stumbled being the operative word, my room is a bomb site).

And as cooler days are coming along really fast, I thought it best to selflessly ditch my plans to clean up my room and instead sew up a denim smock for Sophie straight away. 

 I used a pattern by McCalls from their Easy Stitch 'n Save range ( M5606).  I have drafted dresses similar to these before and had planned to grade up the last one I did, but when I saw this pattern for two bucks on eBay (with free postage!), I thought I'd save myself the trouble and the tracing paper.

Hand sewing the facing along those curves and around the armholes was a bit tedious, I'm thinking I might straighten out the yokes next time.  I will need to grade up a size in a couple of months time anyway (the pattern stops at size 3), so the whole thing will probably get a makeover.

I'm sad that's the last of those lovely big shirts.  The fabric is lovely - light but warm, and easy to sew.  It is rather a boring little smock really, but I love how you can throw these over everything.  We even manage to get a second wear out of t-shirts that may have been drawn or dripped on, which is handy in the winter when you're running out of things to wear while you're waiting for your clothes to dry (I am old school, and line dry everything).

Although I love the cooler weather, it comes with it's flipside.  The drippy noses and the colds have already started.  It's lucky I took this photo a few days ago, because she doesn't look this cute today.  And she's been using her new smock as a hanky, so it doesn't look too cute now either.  Eww, gross.