Christmas Pajamas

Ah, the day after Thanksgiving, when a doll hobbyist's fantasies immediately, violently swing towards Christmas. Blame the siren call of Mariah Carey, maybe, or the fact that it's so much easier to find cute Christmas print fabric than Thanksgiving fabric. (Even if it seems you need to start buying it around July in order to have the best pick of the patterns.) I'd had a vague idea of what I wanted to do for several months, it was just a matter of deciding on the fabric, how much I wanted to make brand new versus using clothes I had on hand, and actually getting down to sewing? My idea? A matching set of holiday pajamas for Skelfthyrnir's entire family.

Yes, even Eikyrn, with his wildly different body shape. His top half is humanoid, after all.

I had a red cotton fabric with a tiny white moose toss pattern, which I had originally gotten and used to make a test pair of pants for Skelf. With a proper pattern from Requiem Art rather than my attempt at drafting one, I laid out the pattern three times for everybody in the family with only one set of legs, and it looked like I would have enough for all three plus extra left over. The pants were the easiest part of this project, being fairly straight forward to sew and with nothing extra added on to the extra pattern. Any MSD scale clothing that lets you easily use a sewing machine is a godsend of pattern.

Stack o' pants. My hand stitching is...messy.

My plan for the extra moose fabric? Ideally, something based on a horse blanket, as a more serious outfit piece based on one for winter wear was also in my plans. Doing a silly pajama version first would let me work out more kinks with cheaper quilting cotton before I started using flannel. So I used some spare fabric to figure out the basic shape and draped in for fit, making a note that the gore needed to be moved further up, to be closer to the forelegs. After that, trace the test piece and adjust, as I only had so much of the moose toss fabric left. The end result of this was needed to cut some extra to make sure the deer chest would be covered, but that was the only piecing needed, aside from the the planned gores.

Having Breyers as a kid came in unexpectedly handy here.

As I sewed up the blanket, I realized it was going to need a little something extra to look finished, so I opted to use some white minky that I had on hand. Minky is the absolute devil to cut and work with because 1. it stretched and 2. it sheds like a husky blowing coat. To try and minimize both of these annoyances,

For the top portion of the pajamas, things would be even more standardized for the whole family, as all four have humanoid torsos and Rhaena's wings blessedly pop on and off via magnets. This meant that I would be able to use the shirt pattern from the same basic shirt and pants pattern used for the pajama bottoms. (Just don't ask how Rhaena would get such a shirt on and off in actuality with great big dragon wings on her back. Doll costuming falls under the MST3k mantra*.) I wanted to use actual t-shirt fabric made from old shirts of my own, to recycle fabric, and after cutting off parts of old shirts with no images on them, I was able to mark off both the shirt bases and additional rectangles for long sleeves. Using two different shirts of different ages meant that two of the shirts came out slightly lighter, but I don't consider it that big of a deal, as reusing old shirts is a good way to save money on fabric.

Then came the sewing. So much sewing. Most of it by hand, because I find doll-sized seam allowances difficult to do on most pieces, outside long, straight paths to sew, like the legs. Before the sleeves and sides could be sewn up on the shirts, though, there was something that needed doing. See, I was a child in the early 90s, when puff paint and Daisy Kingdom iron-ons roamed closets. I had so many pieces of clothing with iron-ons lined with puff paint, and I wanted to copy this for my crew's pajamas. So using some cotton quilting fabric that I really liked the pattern of, but that had too large of a pattern to use as doll pants/shirts itself, I cut out four separate deer, a different one for each member of the family. I used scrap pieces of iron-on double sided fusible from my dragon wings project to attach the images to my shirt bases, and from there it was a matter of stitching everything up and adding velcro in the backs. Because I didn't want to deal with popping off heads if I could help it. After I'd finished the sewing part, then came the puff paint outline around each fabric cutout, then allowing everything to dry before I could get the whole family all dressed up.

And with that, a complete set of pajamas for the entire family, even with their range of body shapes. (Changing hands/feet on hand is KEY for getting them on and off, however. Buy hand/foot paddles, you'll be glad you did.)

So much work, and I'm definitely starting earlier next year-and getting a nice interior Christmas backdrop done up before the deadline. But they got finished, I got photos to show off on Christmas eve, I learned things to apply to making pajamas 2.0. I'm counting this as a success.