Posted on 8 Comments

Banana seats at bedtime

New lounge pants

So, I made another pair of pj pants. I used my usual pattern, but I chopped about 8 inches off of the bottom to make them cropped, and I added a decorative cuff in a coordinating print.

Aren’t these bicycles cute? I love them – they’re very girly in a “riding your banana-seat bike to Big Ben’s 5 & 10 to buy fifty-cent water pistols in the middle of summer” kind of way. Do girls’ bikes even have banana seats anymore? I had a white one covered with bright flowers on my kid-size blue bike in the late 70’s & early 80’s.

New lounge pants

The nitty gritty:

  • Pattern: Simplicity 4429, modified
  • Fabric: Heather Ross, Lightning Bugs
  • Lessons Learned:
    • When adding a contrasting cuff, construct it so that the cuff’s side seams are not visible.
    • When trying to taper the legs after the pj’s are already constructed, do the tapering on the inside of the leg instead of the outside. The outside of the leg should remain straight.

I’m going to try another pair of these soon with a thrifted sheet. I like having cropped pants to wear to bed in the summer, and all of the ones I have from previous years are pretty beat up. With the next pair, I won’t have to deal with the contrasting cuff, and I will taper the legs a bit before I cut out the fabric.

And in the frustrating technical things department, I’m having trouble accessing my blog admin. I discovered I could get into it if I used Internet Explorer (which I hate – I’m a Firefox user), so for now I’m using IE, while I try to figure out the irritating issue. While using IE, I noticed that my blog looks funny – the sidebar is all messed-up. Does it look this way to all of you, too?? If so, I wish I’d known. I want it to look pretty 🙂 It looks really pretty in Firefox, so you all should just switch, LOL! So now the trick is to figure out my admin problem in Firefox and my formatting problem in IE (I think it’s related to the display of my flickr photos). Oh, such fun. [I think I fixed both problems.  Whew.  Now I’m going to bed, and I hope everything is still working when I wake up!]

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Posted on 8 Comments

8 thoughts on “Banana seats at bedtime

  1. I envy your mad sewing skillz. We will make your elastic waist skirts though, I even found the right sheets. PJ pants though, a little past my sewing ability.

    Did you upgrade to the WordPress 2.5 then use one of the randomly available admin themes? Because I used one – forget which one – and it completely mucked up my display in FF but worked sort of alright in IE.

    And I never use IE except to make sure pages load. Have used Mozilla, of some flavour, since I got on the net.

    See what Elaine has been blogging about: Year of Clay – Little Bowls Spring 2008 Edition

    1. Well, when I started sewing almost a year ago, I pretty much stuck with skirts and napkins for months before I got adventurous enough to do pants. And still, I found one pattern that works for me, and am happy not to have to deal with any others. Patterns intimidate me.

      I did upgrade WP, but it was a few weeks ago, and I didn’t change the admin theme. You know what it finally ended up being? Something completely unrelated to WP – a PayPal plugin I installed! I disabled it and everything worked.

      I had forgotten, too, that I have a firefox plugin that lets you open an IE tab from within firefox. It’s very neat, and it makes having to use IE much less disagreeable, since the interfaces is still the firefox one. Next time I have to use IE for something I have to remember to do it that way.

  2. I normally use firefox, but sometimes have to use IE. With my IE your side is the same as with firefox.
    My first pants (about 30 years ago, 2 clown pants for carnival – I’m German and life about 30 Kilometers from Cologne, which is one stronghold of the german carnival) turned out very different. The first one had one red and one yellow leg – that was the one for my boyfriend. Only the second one turned out like I wanted it to be: one leg with red frontside and yellow backside and the other leg opposite.

    1. Thanks for checking. I probably already fixed it by the time you had a look. I am going to have to remember to check IE every time I chage my sidebar. It’ just not something I normally think of.

      Your clown pants sound like fun, and the mistake you made sounds a lot like the kind of thing I get wrong. I frequently will sew things right-side and wrong-side together instead of both right sides together, and I won’t notice until I hold it up and look at it.

  3. Your IE trouble reminded me of this, which I got from a friend at work last week.

    1. Heh. That’s good. It’s funny, when you go into the WordPress admin screen using IE, there is actually a button there that takes you to a site called browsehappy, the sole purpose of which seems to be to get you to switch to anything other than IE.

  4. *IE* shudder. I am a foxfire girl through and through! Heck I don’t even really like Safari (which came with my mac)

    Those are great lounging pants. I may have to make some for me to lounge it….that is when i am done de-cluttering and stripping cabinets and repainting. Are you SURE you don’t wanna come help?

    See what Kathi has been blogging about: let the de-cluttering begin!

    1. Yep, me too. I switched to Netscape from IE many moons ago, and then from Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox, where I’ve been perfectly happy for some time. I love Thunderbird, too. And if I could get their calendar program to handle recurring tasks in a way that makes some sense, I’d be using them for my calendar and task list, too.

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