Sew hot right now: Refashion: Overalls into pinafore (and skirt)

I've been sewing lately, just not blogging.

I had to get a couple of Christmas presents out of the way - dresses for my nieces, which I'm not going to post as I want them to be a surprise.

I've also been busy making lots of little hair clips for the girls. I can't believe I haven't made any of these sooner - they are so easy and come up simply gorgeous with very little effort. I love that I can literally make them out of scraps and that I can make little co-ordinating clips for each of their outfits. I don't think I'll ever buy hair clips again. Here's what I've made so far:

For a quick Sunday afternoon project I decided to make this little nautical themed skirt out of some white cotton batiste and navy blue jumbo ric rac. It's self lined and has a simple elastic casing at the waist. I finished it off with some blue and white buttons. It's for Katherine, but I don't think she has a top to wear with it so that's going to be a project for the future now!

I've been wanting to turn a little pair of overalls into a dress for a while now. My sister actually bought these for one of her daughters, and had a similar fate in mind for them but never got around to it. She gave them to me a while ago and last weekend I finally got around to working on them.

They were really cute and I would have kept them as overalls except for the fact that the press-studs up the inside of the legs never stuck! They would come apart and I was forever trying to press them back together so that Ellie wasn't getting tangled up in the legs and tripping over them. So I cut off the legs and stitched a little gathered skirt around the bottom of it instead.

Advanced reader - skips the children's shelf and goes straight for the war biographies.

Then I decided I really wanted to do something with the leg panels themselves, as they had this really cute embroidery on them.

I thought they would have made a really cute denim skirt but they weren't wide enough to turn into a skirt the way they were so I used a little floral scrap I had and made a centre panel out of that. I had to unpick the original hem on the leg panels, then I stitched the centre panel in place, then hemmed the skirt again and added an elastic casing at the top.