Calling All Kids! Military Inspired Tee

Are you following the “Calling All Kids” series at Alida Makes? Alida has four kids full of personality – who don’t necessarily go for the chain store fare. The series highlights clothes that showcase that personality and aren’t necessarily gender specific. While my four-year old will *literally* jump up and down and clap her hands for a skirt covered in pink sequins, my seven-year old almost wholly rejects dresses, skirts, sequins, ruffles and anything that might be called “girly”. Calling All Kids is the perfect series for her! Her interests are 95% “boy” activities. We’re talking through the finer points of what the military is and what they do and which parts do what, and she was all kinds of excited about a military inspired tee.

I used Kitschy Coo’s Dolman pattern and sliced a bit off of the top of the front and back to add the shoulder stripes. My quick sketch made this look easy-peasy.

The closest fabric store is… umm… maybe 40 miles away. In “use what you have” mode I used a navy heathered sweatshirting for the bands and shoulders and a lightweight royal jersey for the body. Slightly less than easy peasy to mix the weights. The lightness of the jersey meant I needed to double it up to avoid transparency. (Transparency in government = good. Transparency in t-shirts = bad.) The sweatshirting was fantastic to work with. It’s super stable. The lightweight jersey is the chiffon of knit world and as such slightly maddening, but since we’re talking fabric world here, not a crisis. The neckline ended up with a gathered effect I wasn’t going for but at least it’s mostly even. I decided the nix the nutcracker-esque button/round thingies.

She’s pretty insistent about tucking shirts in a la Steve Urkel lately, so we had a bit of an argument over the high-low hem as a design feature. Because I was the half of the argument with control over the ginger lemon cookie she wanted (we’ve graduated from M&Ms as payment for modeling services) I won. This time.