Jungle January: Bite Size Edition

Aww, she's so wiggly she always comes out blurry!

I never participate in Jungle January, not being much for animal prints, but the making of this top just so happened to coincide with it so I figured I'd steal the catchy name.  I bought a rather large woman's button up shirt from the by-the-pound Goodwill which is the main fabric for this little shirt.  It's not just an animal print, it's some kind of crazy paisley, multi-species animal print.  I saw it and had to have it.  Then I used some of it to make a gal at work a Christmas stocking (which I wish I had a picture of because yes it was awesome!!!)  As such, there wasn't really enough left to do a full garment for myself, so I opted to put it on Baby Girl.

She's such the little model, I know.  If you can't guess, this is another iteration of McCall's 8473.  This time with the matching pants.  The pants pattern for this is weird...  It's designed to have suspenders and snaps in the back and along the legs (obviously for diaper changes, I got that much).  Honestly, though, I just don't have time for that so I simplified it a bit (a lot).  I just use the  main pattern piece with the extra snap overlap fabric cut off (yes I traced the pattern first, geez!)  The pants pattern is a bit big, but she grows so fast I'm not too worried about it.  This way she'll actually get to use them for more than a month or two (hopefully!)

The pants are black velour (I think that's what it is anyway).  It's from a maxi length skirt I had in high school for band concerts.  The skirt was definitely showing some wear (most notably from when I tried to hem it with purple thread WTF?) and had generally seen better days.  There was actually just enough for the pants, collar, and cuffs.  The fabric is stretch so it was rather a bitch to do the collar and cuffs, but the pants were easy peasy and oh so warm and soft.

There are four big black buttons on the back.  I was almost surprised I found that many matching ones.  They're all from the big bag o' buttons I found at the thrift store...  Or in the big bin o' buttons that came from my mom.  They're all pretty well mixed together at this point.  It's nice to have lots of buttons on hand for when you need some, but it gets messy finding a number of matching ones!  I started organizing my buttons by color, but kind of petered out at some point.  I really should finish doing that...

The collar on this one is a little crazy but, again, it was really hard to sew that stretchy velour to the not at all stretchy animal print polyester.  Again, I could probably fix it, I just lack the motivation.  

All materials were from stash (yeah! for shopping the stash) but even considering what the main fabric and buttons cost when I bought them, the whole outfit wasn't even close to costing a whole dollar.  Score one for thrifting!

I really like this outfit.  I feel like it's kind of sophisticated since they're less childish fabrics/prints.  She's more like a real person every day!  (A tiny person, but a walking, talking person nonetheless).