• Finished Projects

Cold gray weather has touched down here, but nothing can dull my current sunny disposition as long my legs are encased in crazy stretch velvet leggings! And since I’ve been going nuts making leggings, I’ve got plenty of choices to brighten up my pins.

Since making shiny floral leggings last month, I’d been wearing them continually, so when I spotted this beautiful green stretch velvet on a clearance table I snapped it up.

I made the pattern for these before starting by knocking off the shiny floral leggings. If you’re not familiar with this, “knocking off” is the process of tracing a pattern from an existing garment without destroying the garment. It’s a great technique for copying the pattern of store-bought clothing. In this case, I’d altered the shiny floral leggings so much that the original pattern I’d made them from was pretty useless. It was easier to to just make a new pattern.

UPDATE: Here’s a post showing how I made the pattern!

Leggings number two are also stretch velvet and have a paisley pattern. I feel like Jupiter when I wear these – not in terms of size, but because the pattern on the front reminds me of Jupiter’s spot! By the was, I didn’t attempt to match prints, since I just bought one yard of each fabric.

Leggings number three are my least daring pair, but they match my hair really well. In case you’re wondering about the change, I decided that I really liked my new hair color after dying it for Halloween, so I just added some pale pink to the highlights and I’m going to keep it this way, at least for a bit.

And here is my final pair. I didn’t have to buy this fabric because my in-laws sent it to me wrapped around my Christmas present last year. I’m pretty sure it was just meant to be a festive wrapping, I added it to my stash (of course!)

By the time I made these leggings, I was pretty much a legging-making-machine, but one addition I made to this version was covering the waistband. For the other leggings, I just zig-zagged wide black elastic around the waist (see here) but I wanted these completely red – no black waistband poking out.

I covered the black elastic by folding a strip of red fabric around one side of the elastic and serging it in place on the other side of the elastic.  On my first try, I discovered that when the fabric is stretched lengthwise, it gets narrower in width. However, the elastic stays the same width when stretched, so it folded up inside the waistband when I tried these on.

After some trial and error, I discovered that making the fabric strip 1/2″ wider total – so 1/4″ wider than the elastic when folded around the elastic – fixed the problem.

Then I just serged the covered waistband on to the leggings with the right sides together.

And tada! Those are all my new leggings!

Oh, and speaking of colorful new things, I’d like to smooothly change the subject to Button & Snap’s new unicorn crest. I’m pretty excited about it because it turned out so fun and colorful!

With that I’ll sign off. Hope you’re staying warm even if your weather is cold and dreary too!