Elijah requested a special outfit for our May day celebration this year.

As of late last week, I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. Then one night around 2 a.m. I found myself not feeling well and unable to sleep. I saw the pile of fabric sitting there waiting for me, felt a pang of guilt and decided to get to it.

I didn’t have a pattern, nor a pair of Elijah’s pants handy, so I took my fabric and drew an approximate pant leg shape of what I thought would be around the right size for some beach cut pants. Risky business that… I finished up the pants and went back to bed.
Amazingly enough, they actually did end up fitting.

The pants actually do match up, honest, it’s just that he had been jumping up and down right before I took the picture. (Note to self: Take pictures of new clothes before they have been worn all day and have gotten wrinkled and stained.)

The next day I worked on the shirt. No pattern again. This outfit seemed to be all about embracing free-form sewing. I kept looking at it and thinking about it. I wanted to have a plan. I didn’t want to just make it up as I went along… which ultimately is exactly what I ended up doing! Once I started cutting and sewing, everything more or less fell into place.

(See the stain? There is a lovely grass green adorning the knees now too. Making the whole thing look exactly as kids clothes should look….well played in…)

The fabric is a combination of an organic, color-grown sage oxford and a random leaf print that nabbed a yard of off the clearance table at my local fabric store. The leaf fabric is really sweet and I loved the color on him. It’s “A Season of Toiles From the Allentown Art Museum” by P&B Textiles. I based my leaf embellishment off of the design.

For the trim I used another leaf-y print, this one studded with **ladybugs**, a fact that greatly pleased my middlest boy…