Last month we attended Blogtacular, it is a brilliant conference for Bloggers and indie creatives. All attendees get given an amazing goodie bag and one of the items included was a pattern from Crafty Sew and So. 

It was a pattern to make some PJ shorts, this was a great pattern for me as I have never made shorts before and it is something simple you can make with cotton fabrics.

I decided I wanted to make the shorts, except I wanted to make them as shorts to wear out the house, not just as PJs. I pretty much live in shorts during the summer so I thought it might be nice to make some in an interesting fabric and they would be something I would get a lot of wear out of.

I chose to use some of our Dashwood Studio fabric from the Flock collection, it is a lime green/yellow colour and has a lovely floral design so it looks nice and bright.

I cut the pattern out, at this stage the only change I made was I lengthened the leg measurements by about 10cm as I prefer to wear shorts that are slightly longer.

I then sewed the shorts up as per the instructions, except I left off the frilly trim around the bottom. I tried them on, as I am fairly pear-shaped I made the shorts to fit around the widest point on my hips. The pattern has an elasticated waist which meant there was quite a lot of fabric being gathered onto the waistband which created quite a lot of bulk at the front, this made the shorts look quite puffy and stiff, which if you are wearing them as PJs wouldn’t be a problem but I wanted to make them look more fitted. So this is where I made some more changes. I made the front of the shorts flatter by gathering all of the fabric to the back of the shorts on the waistband, I made sure the fabric was evenly distributed at the back and then stitched two lines of stitching level with the side seams through the elastic on the waistband to keep the gathering in place. This stopped the gathering from moving around to the front.

I also decided to add some belt loops so I could wear a small belt with the shorts. I cut the belt loops out of the scraps left over from the shorts so it didn’t use up any extra fabric. These were really easy to add on and instantly made the shorts look a lot smarter.

I’m really pleased with how the shorts turned out, in hindsight I wish I had added some pockets to make them a little more practical but maybe next time this is something I could do. By just making a few simple adjustments I have been able to turn a simple PJ shorts pattern into something that looks great for wearing out and about. Next time I might try looking for an actual shorts pattern that is perhaps a little more tailored but it was great to be able to adapt the pattern I already had and I enjoyed experimenting with it.