The unfortunately NOT BLUE, blue jeans

Seeing all these awesome posts about boy clothes popping up lately made me want to start whipping up some clothes for my little guy. I'm not going to whine about there being fewer choices for boys' clothing...but there ARE fewer choices.

The good news is, that there are some really awesome patterns though and a lot of them allow for modifications. I mean, honestly, how many styles of jeans do boys need? I haven't made a whole lot in the way of garments. I made a few shirts for me (with varying degrees of success) and earlier this year I made a pea coat from peek a boo pattern shop, and it made me look at garment sewing a bit differently.

So, I finally went for it and bought a few PDF patterns for my 3 year old. I went with PDF patterns for several reasons:

1) They weren't ugly (Sorry McCall's, your boy options suck).
2) I liked being able to save the PDF file and print out the pieces in different sizes..versus having to trace and all that nonsense from a traditional pattern.
3) Even though I've used many commercial patterns, I still often find them confusing as they tend to make things more complicated than neccessary.

So, the first one I bought was The Nowhere Man Pants from Shwin and Shwin. I liked the overall look and it looked easy to modify the features of the pants. I wasn't disappointed.

The pattern was great, super easy to follow and relatively simple. I finished the pants in 3 hours from cutting the fabric to sewing on the buttons. They did seem to run a bit on the smaller side, my three year old wears a 4T and these seemed to be on the slim side. There was not a seam allowance given in the pattern, (a google search later indicated it was 3/8) so I just used a 1/4, preferring to err on the side of being too large. Had I not used a smaller seam allowance and my guy not been so slim, I'm not sure the 4T would have worked.

I thought they came out well, but my quite fickle little man did not agree. He was incredibly displeased that they were NOT BLUE, and I was quickly informed that jeans were supposed to be blue. The pictures are not good, mostly because I only had about a 2 minute window in which he agreed to wear them. Only then, it was because I promised to make a blue pair.

I thought girls were the particular ones.