Elliot's "Zebra" shirt

I know it's just starting for all of you, but Celebrate the Boy has been on the brain over here for a long time. For the last month I've dedicated a good portion of my sewing time to just making clothing for Elliot. I love how sewing for a child makes you spend time thinking about them. For one thing it's made me realize how very little baby is left of him.

I always have more ambitious ideas of what I want to do than what actually gets executed, but still, it's been fun for me to plan a whole new wardrobe for him. He's quite tall and thin and most of the 3T clothes he wore last year are now too short or tight, so he definitely needs it. 

So over the next few weeks I'll show you what I've made for the little dude. Here's one of the first projects, a pleated dress shirt that he calls his "zebra" shirt. It was meant to be a test-run of a pattern I drafted from his measurements, but I liked it enough that I threw on a quick collar and faux cuffs and embellished it with some green buttons and topstitching.  I think it's a keeper!

I made the pants from a pair of Mr Rae's old ones (one of the best places to find good pants fabric for boys is men's pants) and I'll talk more about some of the details of that project on a subsequent post, but if you look carefully you'll see that the pocket linings were made from the same fabric as the shirt. I love how the stripes peek out from the underside of those pockets.

It was so much fun to shoot him as a little adult. I gave him one of Mr Rae's magazines and a pair of my glasses were thrown in for fun. He really got into looking at all the pictures. In the Economist. That's my little nerd.