Summer means...

SHORTS! 

I decided to try and make A something besides a dress and settled on shorts.  Of course, the normal sewing novice would research patterns and follow some sort of direction...not me.   Nope.  I have to do things the hard way.  I took a pair of A's shorts that fit and traced around the pattern. 

My first attempt:
I love this fabric...but not sure what's going on with the crotch...

Um.  Yeah.  Not the fit I'm looking for and those teeny tiny ruffles?  TEDIOUS and may cause random acts of cussing.   But overall a meh sewing performance, and are great night night shorts.

Attempt Two:

Let's just take a moment to appreciate what an ADORABLE and hilarious kid I have.  .......
Okay the shorts.  Attempt two was much better, but the crotch was still weird and the back wasn't high enough to cover her diaper butt.  A toddler in low riders is not high fashion in my humble opinion.  And diapers don't come in low rider cut.  So we need to try again. 

Finally.  I came to my senses and googled a tutorial.  WHAT I was thinking by trying to do it on my own is anybody's guess.  So I found this tutorial at Crafterhours.blogspot.com and went to work. 

Attempt three:

Ahahahaha getting better!  You can see from the huge cheese grin on A's face that she likes her flower shorts.  She is obsessed with flowers so these were kind of special to her.  Please ignore the huge ski foot in the picture.  It's not mine.  I have sweet perfectly pedicured dainty feet I swear.  The back of these were still a little short because I didn't follow directions exactly and forgot to make the back crotch longer.  So onto attempt four.  Good thing I have a lot of time on my hands.


And I decided to make a full summer outfit!

 Walmart had this fabric on sale for really cheeeeap.  The top half was green with frogs, bugs, and rainbows, and the bottom half was the blue plaid.  I used this tutorial for the top and then made some shorts with drawstrings to keep them from falling down.  For some reason when I'm using elastic thread it isn't as elasticy as I thought it would be so the drawstring is helpful.

She wore this outfit to school today!  She loves the frogs and bugs.  I can't stop LOLing at her cheese grin.  So funny. 

So that's the end of my experience with shorts sewing.  Finally I feel confident to whip up a pair quickly if needed.  I know I could always go to Target or WalMart and buy shorts for the cost of making them, but what fun would that be?