Little Lady's Footies

Like any sprouting 4 year old, my daughter busted her toes right through the feet of her footie pajamas, which were “reinforced” during their original construction with 2 layers of fabric. These were purchased in the spring of 2019, when she was 3 ½ years old, and insisted on continuing to wear footie pajamas at night. She only had fleece footies at the time, and we were well past fleece footie weather. But you know, a 3 year old insisting on something pretty much means it’s going to happen one way or another, so I compromised by buying these whale footies made of a lightweight jersey.

 I fixed these holes in January of 2020, which means between spring of 2019 and fall/winter of 2019/2020 she maybe got a good 5 months of wear out of them.

Since I had two feet to work with, I decided to test out two ways of repairing, one with a patch and one with darning.

I started with the patched toe first. I turned the foot inside out and ripped out the seam around the edge of the foot that attaches the two layers of jersey to the no-slip grip fabric on the sole of the foot. I ripped the seam out past the area I want to patch so I had some room to work with. I drew a line where I wanted the patch to start, and I knew I wanted to sew it back into the seam around the edge of the foot.

The fabric I used for the patch came from a cute one-piece outfit she had when she was a baby. I loved the print, I’m pretty sure it was from Tea Collection, so I saved it knowing I might be able to use it for something like this in the future. It had complimentary colors to the whale pajamas, so I thought it would make a nice contrast.

I attached it at the straight line I drew on top of the foot and then folded it back towards the toes.

Once it was flush against the original fabric, I cut the toe shape out and serged the edges back together. I kept the original 2 layers underneath, so there are now 3 layers of jersey on top.

For the other foot, I wanted to try darning. A large majority of my embroidery thread is either passed down from my mother-in-law or bought second hand. The remaining minority of embroidery thread I have is leftovers from a few projects where I did buy the thread new because I needed specific colors for specific projects.

For this mending project I chose colors that existed on the whale pajamas, a pale pea green and a pale pink. I started with the pale pink running across the toes and wove the green in the other direction.

And this is the finished product! I am happy with how they turned out and so is my daughter. She wore them for a few more months after this, but again it became too warm for footies. There are some holes forming in the knees now, so I will have to decide whether or not those are worth fixing. The pajamas are already obviously tight from her shoulder to her feet, and now that it's time to wear them again, she is only taller. But it’s always fun to practice, so I might just do it anyway!