Toddler Legs

I've been busy the last two days, but since I'm feeling sick today and my mom was so nice and took the kids to let me rest, I might as well take the time to put these projects on this blog.

The first one I did I like to call Toddler Legs. You may have heard of Baby Legs. Before I had Maddy, I was told by multiple people that I HAD to get some because they were so much better than tights and everything...but I never got any.

Now my baby is a Toddler, and she has larger-than-normal thighs and cankles. (Totally from her father, in case you were wondering. No, really, its a plague that a large number of the Anglesey family seems to have inherited.) She also has WIDE feet (again, from her daddy) so she doesn't like to wear shoes or socks or actually pants most of the time either. Lately she's been fighting me if I put anything but stretchy leggings or dresses on her.

On Sunday I saw that my mom had pulled out her old Leg Warmers, vintage of course. She said she's seen in the Sunday ads how "in" they are so she dug through her stuff until she found the ones she'd had on her mission in France. They still look pretty good I must say. I'm not a big fan of the leg warmer look, but it got me thinking...I had the rest of the mustard-yellow sweater I made John's owl hat out of. The sleeves were intact, that would be just right...

Here's the general how-to of how I made Maddy's Toddler Legs:

Cut the sleeves to the desired length (I left a lot of extra for seam allowance, since I don't have a serger and this stuff unravels really easy). Then I trimmed off the side portion there so it was more of a rectangular shape.
I turned right sides together and stitched it up.

For the top ribbing, I cut out the collar from the sweater. I'll show you why in the next pic. (PS I should have left more fabric underneath for seam allowance. Just FYI.)

This is the collar part; as you can see it is hollow inside. A ready made elastic casing! One step saved, how many more to go?!

With right side together, I pinned and sewed the collar/elastic casing to the leg warmer. Maddy was sleeping at the time so I didn't get to measure her legs...a mistake! I underestimated the size of her thighs. I threaded some thin elastic through and when she woke up tried it on her and found at first it didn't need elastic to stay up. (She wore the Toddler Legs all day yesterday, however, and they started falling down more and becoming more like leg warmers so I'm going to go back and put elastic in anyways.)

Finished product, back view (I was considering this a practice run for a better project, which I will show you all later, so thats why I didn't bother to make the stripes match up very nicely. Next time I'll try harder.)

Finished product, front view. The cuff of the sleeve is now the bottom of the Toddler Leg.

Blurry beyond belief, but gives you the idea of how my daughter felt about wearing them the first night. She LOVED them the next day, but it was a little discouraging to finally finish only to have her scream and cry when I tried to put them on.

John was a much more willing model. Poor kid, just wait til you see what else I put on him to take pictures (if you look at my other blog you'll get a glimpse). From now on I think I'll just make clothes for him.