Kid's Patterns: Butterick 3475

I've been trying to sew a shirt and shorts for my nephew, and this has been an adventure in frustration. I'm using Butterick 3475, and he is so tall and skinny that his height is off the size chart, but his other measurements fall between a 4 and a 5. So I end up having to lengthen everything by 5 or 6 inches.

He normally turns up his nose at the things that I make (ewww, homemade. That must be even worse than hand-me-downs in the mind of a seven-year-old), but he's been bugging me to make him "something with skuls. Or flames. Or skulls and flames But definitely skulls." So I found a black, white and grey quilting cotton that looked a bit like camouflage made out of skulls. I also found a black denim for the shorts that was embroidered with skulls and crossbones.


Once I got the patterns altered, everything went together very easily. The shirt was super-simple, and the sleeves eased in perfectly. In continuing on my quest to make garments with attractive insides as well as outsides, I made the shirt with french seams and used binding on the armscyes and the edge of the front facing:


The shirt was a really simple to assemble, the facings were cut right on the the front of the shirt, and they do not extend around the back of the neck. The center of the collar is folded up and whipstitched to the seam allowance.


For the shorts, I tried my hand at making flat felled seams. The embroidery on the denim made it a little difficult to press those tiny seam allowances when you are trying to fold one of the embroidered spots. I nearly roasted my fingers with the steam from the iron, but was ultimately successful. I made the flat fell seams as follows:

Begin by pressing the seam allowance open and trimming one side of the seam allowance to 1/4". I did all the seams so the shorter seam allowance that the other allowance would be folded over is the one facing the back:


Next press both allowances to one side, with the narrower allowance laying over the wider:


fold the wider allowance back over the narrower, "wrapping" it around the narrower seam allowance:


Then press the seam allowance to the other side so that the raw edge is caught between the seam allowance and the pant leg:


Then stitch along the edge, making a seam parallel to the original seam:


The completed seam:


Here are the finished shorts. The hems aren't really two different lengths, that's just the way they are hanging: