A week ago, when looking for pants for my little one, I spotted a pair of size 10-12 girls tights in the clearance section. The tights had a teeny hole in the top, but they were otherwise perfect.
For three dollars, I made one pair of baby legs or leggings, and one pair of cute baby tights. The baby legs are perfect for protecting the knees of my little crawler, and the tights - well I just love tight fitting pants on fat baby legs. So, so cute! I've seen quite a few tutorials online for making baby legs out of socks, but I think that large sized girl tights work better as you have lots more fabric to work with, and they are nice and stretchy.
Carlee and I are both visiting my parents right now, so this was a project we made together. We are rarely in the same place so it was fun to do a quick sewing project together. (Okay, Carlee did all of the sewing and cutting because she's better at it than I am. I pinned and took pictures. Does that still count as sewing together?)
We started out by finding a pair of my little girls pants that fit, and using them as a guide for sizing.
For the baby legs, we cut two legs, and then bands for both the tops and bottoms of each. The top and bottom bands were all the same size. The measurements were just eyeballed, as we were sewing for a baby who didn't care, and also with knit which is pretty forgiving. We made the baby legs the length of the lighter coloured pants from the crotch to the bottom of the hem. The original tights were long enough that we were able to have enough fabric for all of this.
For the tights, we cut off and used the original waist band as the band on the tights, and all the same crotch and seaming as well. In addition to sewing the waist band back on again, we also sewed on two bands to finish the bottom edeges. For these, we cut a length of the tights and folded it in half. This gave us a nice bottom hem, and all the cut edges were sewed together at the same time.
The sewing part was easy. (I think, Carlee did it pretty fast.) I pinned all the pieces together so raw the edges touched. Carlee sewed using a zigzag stitch, and went around each seam two times to be sure it would hold. On the tights, to prevent the seam from getting too wavy, she sewed on top of a sheet of tissue paper. This kept the knit from getting as stretched out. The tights we used were really stretchy, and this made it hard to keep the seams looking clean. Carlee is pickier about this than I am, but this extra step didn't add very much time to the whole project.
I'm happy with the finished product!
Oh, okay, do you want to see the finished product on the model - here you go! Babies make everything cuter, don't they?
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