when i saw dana’s beach robe pattern, i just couldn’t resist!  it’s a very well-written pattern with lots of wiggle room for your own creativity.  my only comments are that i tried to make this out of a bath towel instead of a beach towel and ran out of fabric before i cut the robe tie (which is why the tie is in a contrasting color, but i kinda like it that way) and the sleeves are enormously long on my kid (as in, they have to be rolled about halfway up before his hand peeks out) and the body is a bit short (when i pick him up and perch him on my hip, my arm and hip get soaked from his swim trunks).  that said, much longer and he’d trip on it and i could easily swap for the short sleeves on the next robe.

i lined the hood with this fantastic fabric from spoonflower (bitty bots by pattysloniger) that i fell in love with and couldn’t resist and have been searching for a good project to use it in–this fits the bill!  i especially love how (accidentally) the robot halves along the back middle seam make mash-up robots with half-and-half faces!

it was really a fairly easy pattern and i’m tempted to make a few more for gifts.  but i think i’ll buy beach towels next time!

hmmm… how long can i drag this blog meme out?  i haven’t finished showing you all the fun clothes i’ve made recently!  okay, here’s another shirt that went from an adult size medium:

to about a size 2T (a little big on my little guy, but that just means he can wear it for two summers, maybe?):

i took inspiration from this post, except that since the collar on the original shirt didn’t seem overly huge on him, i cut the front and back of the shirt out of the top of the shirt, leaving the collar and shoulders intact.  all i really did was shorten it, bring the sides in and cut new sleeves (out of the original sleeves, no hemming!).  i will say that the button spacing is slightly odd (either the top button is buttoned and he looks a bit stiff and formal, or it’s left open and he could show off chest hair if he had any), but other than that, this was a totally simple re-do and i’m pretty pleased with the results!  by the way, i did use a pattern for this re-do.  it was “kai’s shirt” from weekend sewing by heather ross.

the “fun pod” got a paint job this weekend.  baby dude approves.

another free online pattern that recently caught my eye was the “bapron” pattern & tutorial from the adventures of rory and jess. we already owned a number of cute bibs, but many of them were too small to cover his whole chest and the one that was big enough was always popping up over the edge of his tray and covering his food so that he couldn’t see (or eat) it! the thing i loved about this pattern was that the bottom half of the bib/apron was pulled in close to his body and yet there was still only one set of ties to fasten the whole thing–brilliant! i whipped up the first one using oilcloth and some twill tape that i had in my stash (the oil cloth is fine, but a bit stiff. the twill tape was a mess to work around those curves!) and you can see it (very out of context, but at least he’s sort of holding still!) in the photo above. i found myself using it as my default bib, so last weekend, i put together three more. the top and bottom ones are fabric backed with PUL and the middle one is made of two back-to-back layers of laminated cotton. i totally love the way they turned out. if i remember to do so, i’ll let you know how they hold up over multiple uses.