Just under the deadline! This afternoon, I finished the pair of pants that broke my sewing machine on Tuesday evening. Perhaps I was inspired by all of the fun curtain projects that showed up in week two with Sound of Music themes, and I went ahead and made Fern some more "skirt pants". These aren't really very wide legged, but they do have a double ruffled layer on the bottom. She had seen a girl in a similar style pant this fall and admired them, so I had been thinking about making something like this. 

I started with this portions of some old curtains that my mom handed down to me: 

I love these fabrics and have used pieces of them for various other projects already. For these pants, I kept the wavy panels of the floral and stripe as the bottom hem of the ruffles, and used the top fabric as the main pants. I kept the existing casing on the top of the curtain and inserted 1/2 " elastic into it for the waist. 

Here is the finished product:

 The floral ruffle on the bottom stays kind of hidden, but peaks out where the striped wave rises up. It also helps the ruffle be little more full. 

    Fern was very happy with them. She put them on right away (after running upstairs to find a shirt that matched) and did a little bit of modeling for me. 

  And there she is with Dad and Jasper (the pooch). The pants really do match the rug quite nicely! I am very proud of how nice the inside of the pants look as well. The pants are a glorified legging pattern that I made myself after dissecting an old pair of pants and have been adapting to make all sorts of pants for the girls. So it is one piece for each leg; the two pieces are sewn together at the crotch and the individuals legs are sewing together up the middle. I used a flat felled seam at the crotch, and french seams on the legs. The panel of curtain I used for the main pants was already lined with white fabric and had that casing attached already. The tricky part of using the existing casing is that you have to sew the outside of the garment together while leaving the inside of the casing open so that you can insert your elastic, then find a neat way to sew the inside of the casing closed after the elastic is inserted. I did a sort of fake flat felled seam for the inside of the casing which worked well for me.

           So ta da! Nice heavy pants that hopefully she will want to wear as we make our way through the rest of the winter. (and she is a happy girl again, now that she is on some meds for her first ear infection).