Making a Nightie: from one I love already

I have a nightie that I love.  I love the style, the shape of it, and the way it sits on my body.  The only problem is that the material is synthetic and, whilst that means that it flows nicely, it's very hot to sleep in and I really dislike being hot in bed.  So, as I wasn't actually wearing it as much as I wanted to, I decided to take it apart and see if I could make a pattern from the parts to then make the same nightie in cotton.

I wish now that I had taken a photo of what this nightie looked like before I cut it up, but it didn't occur to me until after I had started that I might want to write a blog about this process.  I have chosen a slightly odd fabric to use, cotton Harry Potter-themed fat quarters I found in Aldi, but as this was mainly me testing out the pattern design I was making I decided to go with something fun.

The first thing I did was take apart the nightie and then laid each panel onto greaseproof paper, which I used as I don't actually have pattern paper and this was the closest thing I could find in my home.  I then traced around them loosely to get an idea of the shape, before converting it into actual curves and straight lines.

There wasn't enough space on the greaseproof paper to actually draw the whole front panel, so instead, I folded it in half and just made a pattern for that.  Any future nighties I make from this will need to be made by folding the fabric in half first.  In the end, the pattern pieces I now have are one front piece to cover half the front panel, one back piece to make two back panels, one front lining piece for the top front half of the nightie, and one back lining piece for the top back half of the nightie.

As the fat quarters weren't large enough to cover the whole panel I decided to sew them together first using French seams so that they wouldn't rub me when I slept.

A French seam is where you line the fabric back sides together, sew along the seam.  Then you trim down the seam, turn the fabric front sides together, iron them flat, and then sew along the seam again enclosing the raw seam. 

Once this was done I cut out the panels I would need using my pattern pieces and sewed the back and front sides together.  As the work I needed to do to make the fabric pieces big enough for the panel basically meant sewing the two back panels together already I didn't actually need to do that step here.

At this point I just pointed the back and front pieces together using a basic seam stitch as I hadn't decided how I actually wanted to finish this section off.  I did do the seam around the leg slits on either side though.

It was then time to move onto the inner linings, which I joined together and then did a zigzag stitch all along the lower raw edge as I don't have an overlocker to finish these raw and I've read that using this type of stitching works pretty well.

I then joined the top edge of the lining to the top edge of the nightie front side to front side, adding in the front straps and strap loops at the back as I went along.  To make life easier for myself I had decided to use the ribbon that the fat quarters had come with instead of making the straps myself using fabric.  The lining was then folded back over to the inside, ironed down and top stitched along the top of the nightie to hold the panels in place.

Then it moved to trying the nightie on for the first time and that's when I realised two things.  Firstly I had had to make a slight change with the straps because I had accidentally sewn in the ribbon off-cut as one of the straps and had had to cut the other one down to size.  When I tried it on I could see that, when folded over, it was way too short so I just opened it up to its full size and sewed it straight onto the back rings.

The second issue was that it turned out to be slightly too tight.  I was expecting the fit to be a bit different as I had gone from a synthetic material to much stiffer cotton. However, I realised that in this case, I just didn't have enough material in the back panels.  When I went back to the pattern pieces I noticed that I had made this panel 5cm too short along the bottom edge.  I drew up a new pattern piece with this extra width for future use, but for this current project, I decided to just add a triangle piece on each of the lower side seams.

It then came to deciding how I was going to finish these seems off and I went for a run and fell seam due to it's strength and the fact that it gets used a lot of clothes that get a lot of wear and washing.  To do this you trim down one of the seams (usually on the back edge), then fold the other side seam around the trimmed seam and pin it flat.  Then you sew along the folded edge creating what is hopefully two rows of parallel stitching.....hopefully.  

And that's it, I now have a new nightie.  It's much stiffer than the nightie I made it from and doesn't quite have the same fall, but I've already been sleeping in it and the material has softened up considerably.  It's also a lot less hot to sleep in, which was my main goal and I now have a pattern that I can use to make this nightie again in the future.  As an additional plus, I also used the remaining fat quarter fabrics, a ribbon I had in the craft box for a stupidly long time, and the now scrap fabric from my old nightie to make my partner a Harry Potter themed project bag with a matching pouch for all his tools (I took the photo before I had put the zip into the pouch as I hadn't realised you should do that first - quite a learning curve that turned out to be).  He's a big Harry Potter fan so that was a win and I really love the combination of the two fabric patterns together and am now slightly jealous.