My children don’t need pajamas treated with chemical flame retardants. I don’t leave candles, incense, fireplaces, or fire of any kind unattended, I don’t permit smoking in our house, and even if I did do any of those things, I’m still going to go ahead and say that my kids don’t need flame-retardant pajamas.
They don’t wear flame-retardant play clothes, and play clothes are what they wear when they light incense and make crayon encaustic art and blow out birthday candles, anyway.
I sew my children’s pajamas by the season–two for cool weather, two for hot weather, two for cold weather, and by the time it gets to cool weather again we’re up to a new size. My girls have worn pajamas made from vintage Sesame Street bedsheets that they helped sew, nightgowns made from flannel that they choose brand-new from the store, pajama pants of fleece that got worn night and day and then night again.
Children’s pajamas are actually some of the easiest children’s clothing to make, and they can be the most fun to embellish. Check out these five pajama projects for inspiration:
If your loved one already owns a pair of comfy, well-fitting pants or shorts with an elasticized waist, then it’s quite easy to copy that pattern to make a pair of pajama pants. The Simple Pajama Shorts tutorial from Made shows you exactly how to do it, even down to copying that fiddly little difference between the front and back of the pants.
For pajama shorts, consider some more unusual, but very comfortable, fabric choices–pillowcases, thrifted XL T-shirts with fun images, an adult’s fleece pajama pants, etc.
[Image by Made, used with attribution]
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Guess I never much thought about the flame retardant thing for pj’s. My daughter typically just chooses to sleep in whatever she wore during the day. Occasionally she will pick out pj’s, but usually only when she takes a bath or shower before bed.
We don’t *really* do a lot of pj’s here, either, although the kids technically have them, but my in-laws are going to be babysitting my kiddos overnight next month, so I figured that I’d better step up! In my experience, grandparents tend to expect things like pajamas on my children. And don’t even get them started about socks!
Love the pillowcase PJ idea! I do something similar, but instead of a pillowcase, I cut off an adult t-shirt under the arms and use that tube of fabric for the skirt. Those are my daughter’s favorite thing to sleep in.
That sounds ridiculously comfy. I use the front graphics on XL T-shirts a lot for other sewing projects, so gathering the bottom fabric and using it for a nightgown, perhaps layered with several rows of T-shirts, would be a really excellent re-use, I bet.
I love this post because I have been a champion of natural untreated fabrics for pjs (and everybody else) since my children were born ( 1980 and 1982!) I alway said that I made their pjs because I didn’t believe that flame retardant chemicals were healthy and they were unnecessary because my children were not allowed to smoke in bed- ha ha…but seriously I wouldn’t even dress them in polyester because babies sweat so when they sleep. My son got a rash when he was very little and our pediatrician suspected Bounce dryer sheets. As soon as I stopped using those poisonous things the rash cleared up. I am also the queen of ripping out tags in all our clothes. Why do the manufacturers not realize how much the tags bother us?
ditto on the tags!!
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