Baby in a Bag: I Sewed SO Many Newborn Baby Gowns!

Among the other things that I've been doing this week--sledding, seriously considering homeschooling the kids next academic year, cooking dinner after dinner after dinner, reading novel after novel after novel, and watching scary movies with Mr. Craft Knife (if one can be said to have "watched" Paranormal Activity if one had one's hands in front of one's face the entire time)--I've also been sewing a part of my collection of awesome thrifted shirts into what are, I guess, newborn gowns, but what Mr. Craft Knife and I always called "baby bags":
They're to sell at our local hippie parenting store, and frankly, I can't think of a better thing to do with the Che Guevara T-shirt that just never quite fit right again after the little kid came to be.

The basic pattern is easy enough, although the lapped shoulders gave me hell. After I figured out a cobbled-together pattern for them that worked, however, I made up my own construction technique that is definitely NOT the way you're supposed to do them, and that, and an outrageous number of straight pins (and plenty of Law and Order: SVU on Netflix), gets them done:
The reason that my partner and I so adored the baby bag when our own little ones were baby bag-sized is in the bottom hem:
Elastic! The gown is meant to be long on the baby, and so the elastic keeps it narrow enough that she can kick and kick and kick happily and not kick off her clothes, but it is the easiest imaginable process in the world to pull the gown up to change her big, cloth-diapered butt.

Of course, the baby bags that Mr. Craft Knife and I used were lovingly gifted to us from places like BabyGap, and so they were on the cool side of baby-dom (I think I remember that one had a houndstooth pattern--woo-hoo!), but they weren't as cool as this. Just think--tie-dye! Skulls (Stolen from my own private stash of skull shirts that I'm saving up to make a skull T-shirt quilt out of, no less)!

Awesome bands!

I have a Smashing Pumpkins one, too, that I'm hoping to finish up tonight before watching The Puppet Masters behind my hands.

And, um, of COURSE the Great Wall of China:

Don't tell Mr. Craft Knife, but it kind of makes me want to have another baby, just so I can dress her entirely in clothing that I've sewn from awesome thrifted T-shirts.

Because if I was pregnant again, I'd TOTALLY have all the time in the world on my hands for sewing newborn layettes, right?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!