Dress Up Non-Clothes

Toddlers love dress up clothes. Actually, the lure appears to last at least for some kids, since we have a nearly 7-year old visitor who is addicted to our dressing up bag. Most of what's in it is not really clothes, though.

Some things are playsilks, big brightly colored squares of silk. You can buy playsilks predyed lots of places or buy plain and dye them yourself. Some people like Koolaid dying them, which is relatively non-toxic but gives pretty restrained results. I used procion dyes in the microwave. Big fun, not for small kids! Pay attention, or the best possible outcome is a splatter-dyed kitchen! Thai Silks has good silks both dyed and undyed (they think they're scarves), Dharma Trading Company has good undyed silks and dyes. Searching on "playsilk" should turn up plenty of suppliers of the pre-dyed, officially meant for playing kind; my local supplier for that kind of thing is The Play Store.

Then we have similar objects made by going to fabric stores just after Halloween and buying dress-up fabrics on sale. Buy a yard and a half or so and hem them (a serger is handy for this, because rolled hems are the way to go if you can). These are the mainstays of our dressing up bag, lots of glitz, no restrictions.

I also always check out the remnant bin. A remnant that's close to a yard is good for the rolled-hem treatment. One that's in the quarter-yard range becomes a sash: Fold the remnant in half, raw edge to raw edge; sew down the raw edges and across one selvedge. Use the open selvedge edge to turn. You're done.

For things in the range between narrow enough to make a sash and wide enough to be interesting alone, I make a vest. This requires a serger, a lot of hemming patience, or two lightweight remnants to make it reversible.

If you're visual, you can probably get the whole point from this picture. If not, it should at least help you understand the wordy version.

The serger/fun with hems version:

1. Fold the fabric in half, selvedge to selvedge.
2. Fold it in half again, raw edge to raw edge. It is now folded in quarters.
3. Cut up the second fold line to the first foldline. It now has a slit that runs from the selvedge to the center, halfway between the two edges.
4. Unfold it, and refold it just raw edge to raw edge.
5. Cut out a head space at the top of the slit.
6. Hem the edges of the slit.
7. Sew a side seam on each side, leaving a generous armhole space at the top.
8. Hem the remaining raw edges on the armholes.

That looks like a lot of steps but it isn't really. To do the reversible version, do all the cutting steps on both pieces of fabric, and then sew the side seams on each. Put them together right side to right side and sew around the slit and the armoholes. Use the bottom to turn (and frankly, it's a selvedge, I'd just leave it alone at that point).

We also sewed a bunch of glittery dance skirts for toddlers at one point. (As in, 2 helpers who know nothing about sewing helped pin, and we made a dozen skirts in a few hours one afternoon.) Each skirt consisted of a foot of confetti dot sequin fabric (from this lot), 2.5 inches of velvet (from a mixed craft lot), and 20 inches of 3/4" elastic. I serged the bottom of the sequins, folded the velvet in half wrong sides together, pinned it right side to right side of the sequins, serged that (now I have a velvet waistband), threaded the elastic through the waistband, and then serged elastic, velvet, sequins and all into a tube with what I think of as a back seam. The toddlers have a fine indifference to where the seam lands. They just put them on and shimmy like mad.

My newest adventure into maximum glitter, minimum seams was a cocoon jacket. I didn't make this up, but now I can't find the book I got it from. Anyway, your basic cocoon jacket goes like this: Take a rectangle of fabric. Find the middle of the long edge. Fold the bottom corners up to meet at the middle of the long edge and then lay the sides along the top. Sew the sides to the top. If your fabric is exactly twice as wide as it is high, this gives you a triangle, and you will need to cut off the points where it was folded to make armholes. Otherwise it gives you some weird other shape which probably has armholes already. I used a yard of 45" inch fabric, so there was selvedge left over at the end. It was pretty icky selvedge, so I folded it under and stitched around the fold.