It's couture knock off time! Kenzo Kids style

I could be accused of getting carried away with "project" sewing (Exhibit A, Exhibit B) but there's a lot of fun to be had in making things just a bit more than was required....

P needed another pair of these pants:

I'd bought these from a now defunct store called Kids on Parade which sold lots of high end fashion clothes for kids. I suspect everyone else, like me, only bought anything from there when it was heavily discounted in the sales. These Kenzo Kids pants were one such bargain

They are a size 4 and have a lovely slim fit and have been P's good pants for almost two years but they're definitely now too short. I wanted to try and make my own and replicate all these little designer-y features.

I experimented with the patterns I had that seemed appropriate and came up with my Pattern Mash Prototype pants. They have proven to be a great pair of pants but were a little more of a relaxed fit than I wanted so I took half an inch of each back panel at the side seam. I also raised the back yoke seam about an inch by adding to the pants panels and subtracting from the yoke.

Then I took the scissors to the old pants and stole all those Kenzo tags (sadly not the pocket rivets as they're one use only)

Essentially I used the front of the Oliver + S Field Trip pants and the back of the After School pants, splitting the front pants to include the extra inner leg panel.

 

I bought some little pyramid rivets from Jimmy's Buttons which is also where I found this grey denim remnant. There was about a metre and a half on the roll and I paid 5 bucks for it!

 



I'm not sure what kind of modelling style we're channelling here....

So there are my Kenzo knock off pants, modelled above with (yet another) Flashback Skinny T

But I couldn't stop just with the pants. Nope, if you're going to wear Kenzo, it would seem you need to get a tiger on your sweater....

The idea of knocking off one of these sweaters with some fleecy sweater knit and fabric paint from Spotlight was just too amusing (for me at least)

I did a dry run here using the Field trip pattern again for the sweater, but decided in the end to do an upsized Flashback Skinny T. I cut a size 9/10 in width and size 5 in length. The blue striped one earlier is straight size 5 and perfect as a close fitted T-shirt using very stretchy fabric. This one could still do with more depth in the armholes and sleeve width and I should have cut the neck-hole back at the smaller size but I'm happy with it.

....if only cause it was fun to paint!

It's a long blog post, but stick around if you're curious as to how some of these things were done.....

First up, the detail on the pants pocket: I don't have a fancy sewing machine that does embroidery so there was no way of perfectly replicating the mid section of the pocket detail from the original pants.

But my sewing machine can do these stitches:

So I used the Orange A stitch for the straight lines and a couple of rows of the Blue J stitch to get the wavy midsection effect

 

And after Heidi taught me to topstitch with two threads I thought I'd try for three!  Using three lots of regular thread is STILL easier than trying to thread a needle with that thick topstitching thread! Here's another shot of how they all sat atop the machine:

 



Now to the sweater....

I downloaded the clearest and flattest picture I could find of the tiger logo and then traced it to tidy up some of the lines and make it clearer. Then from this image I traced again, using a Iron-on Transfer Pencil onto baking paper.

At this step the image needs to be in reverse. If you have a really clear image you can flip your paper over and trace it from behind. Otherwise, when printing the image you need to select T-shirt transfer paper as your printing medium and the printer will reverse the image for you. Or I guess you could reverse the image in any photo editing software before you print. Anyway, make sure it's back to front.

Put your traced picture facing down onto the fabric and iron it on. Be careful as the pencil marks do not wash off and the print is not really useful a second time over without recolouring all the lines. you can just see that I've drawn up a grid with washable pencil markings to make sure I got it straight first go.

Then you simply paint over the drawn lines. I used Setacolour brand paint as the green paint and it is lovely to work with. Two layers gave a good depth of colour with no brush marks. The orange paint however, was Jones Tones and it needs a lot more layers and then develops quite a thick plastic-ky feel and you can still see through it a bit.

 

These paints only take a few hours to be dry to touch and then you iron them (with a baking paper sheet or similar over the paint to stop it sticking to the iron) for a few minutes. Then they wash and wear really well.

So there's my Kenzo Kids knock off outfit.... As I'm posting this last picture I'm making myself laugh wondering if there's any way I can incorporate a conical Gaultier bra into a  princess dress-up costume for A...