Lobster Shorts for the Boy, and the Myth of Flat Piping

This isn’t a real post, so don’t get too excited.  It’s just a chance to show off a particularly successful pair of shorts I made for our son before we headed out of town on our mega-road trip.

Remember this photo?

Our girls are wearing their handmade jersey tees, and our boy is wearing his Lobster Shorts.  Which I looooooove.

These were made with an altered version of the pattern I used for our children’s other summer shorts, but this time I had the good sense to include a little piece of “flat piping” along the seam edge of the slant pockets, and it totally makes the shorts for me.  Plus: lobster fabric!!!  I see no downside here.

These have an elastic back waist and a flat front, which is my default setting for kids’ shorts (the shorts pattern I designed way back in 2010 for my Sewing Clothing for Kids e-course had both the elastic back/flat front and a mock fly, and I’ve pretty much been hugging that lane ever since).  In this pair, I realized I’d inadvertently ordered 30 yds of 1/2″ elastic instead of 30 yds of 3/4″ elastic, and so I used two channels of elastic–sort of a twinnie casing–and ran one length of the 1/2″ with one length of 1/4″ that was in my drawer.  I actually love it a lot, and found that it offered more freedom of movement for my son but more stability for the garment.  Am exploring the ramifications of this two-elastic-channels discovery; hold for details.

And as for that set of quotation marks around my flat piping comment above…see, the thing is, I don’t really think flat piping is a thing.  What I mean is, it’s not PIPING.  It’s TRIM, I don’t question that, but there seems to have been a trend in the past couple of years calling this piping, which I find disagreeable.  Or more accurately, maybe I just disagree, because I don’t think I care enough for it to be disagreeable, if that makes sense.  Again, it’s TRIM, yes, absolutely.  But for me, from my experience (I didn’t look this up in any Absolute Sewing Authoritative Handbook of Rules or anything, so what do I know?), piping is filled, usually with some kind of cording; if it’s flat, it ain’t piping, it’s trim.  So I trimmed out these pockets with a length of bias tape, folded in half and pressed, inserting the raw edges into the seam and matching them with the raw edge of the pocket pieces before adding the pocket facings and finishing out the shorts front panels.  I did NOT pipe them.  Or maybe I did, whatever.

Alright, so this turned into a little bit more of a real post than I was expecting.  Good for me.  I didn’t post anything during Kids Clothes Week (I don’t think I even sewed anything during KCW, since we were on vacation?  or had just gotten back from vacation?  one of those–my calendar is a little muddled), so I’m a bit surprised I have so much kids’ clothing to share at all, to be honest.  Will pat self on back and reward my labors with a nice coffee-flavored iced beverage and an episode of Bones.  Done and done.