We are active sleepers in our household, which tends to wear out our fitted sheets very quickly.  Recently a well-loved linen sheet gave up the ghost - it happened so quickly that one night while going to bed I noticed a small rip, figured “oh well, I’ll take care of it tomorrow,” and by the next morning it was not something a quick mend was going to fix.

But aside from the very worn section right around the rip, the fabric was still in great condition, and it was linen so I felt like just turning that much quality fabric into dust rags or cabbage would be a bit of a waste. After considering my options for a while, I hit on the idea of making a set of linen pajamas.  I have a hard time finding store-bought summer loungewear without buying separates – I prefer long pants but loose, sleeveless tops, and it always seems like summer pj sets in the store are either big shirt + tiny shorts, or pants + very tight tank top.

In my sewing pattern stash I already had two patterns that would combine perfectly: the Margot pants from Tilly and the Buttons and the Chirripo top by Itch to Stitch (sleeveless version). As these are both commercial patterns this won’t be a tutorial on how I sewed them, but rather some of the tips and tricks I learned in trying to work with my ripped bedsheet.

Tip 1: Take out the elastic and flatten the shape

This probably goes without saying, but if you are working with a fitted sheet, before you do anything else you should remove any elastic and also open the seams that create the corners.  I picked apart one of the corners around the elastic casing until I could get to the elastic directly, snipped the loop open and wriggled the elastic out.  As a bonus, now I have a lot of good elastic I can reuse in later projects.

I started to pick apart the corner seams with a seam ripper and then I realized that I wasn’t going to need to be that careful about saving every millimeter of fabric, so I just cut the seams open, which was much quicker.  Once that was done, I ironed the sheet as best I could (focusing mostly on flattening out the former elastic casing, which was obviously quite puckered), and laid the sheet out on the floor to figure out how to lay out my pattern pieces.

Tip 2: Take advantage of the “hemmed” edge if you can.

As I was ironing out the sheet, I realized that the empty elastic casing had basically turned into a nice hemmed edge. I knew from previous sewing projects using linen that it frays pretty easily, so I wanted to try to lay out my pattern pieces to allow me to use some of that pre-sewn hem. I couldn’t get the pants pieces to line up to use them for the cuffs (which was for the best, they ended up pretty long and I had to hem them a few additional inches anyway), but I did line up the bottom edge of the shirt pieces to utilize the hem.  Additionally I discovered that by carefully cutting the rest of the casing off the sheet, it made a perfect drawstring for the pants (which meant I didn’t have to spend any time folding and sewing a tiny strip of fabric, yay!). 

Tip 3: It’s upcycled fabric, don’t expect perfection

In laying out the pattern, it became clear that the best quality fabric was on the edges, where the fabric had curved over the mattress and thus taken less direct wear and tear. This worked great for the pants pieces, which I could basically fit down the length of two sides, but required a bit of careful thought to get all of the top pieces lined up along the same grain on fabric that hadn’t started to wear thin.  

It was also extremely difficult to cut the pattern pieces perfectly square – linen can be slippery under the best conditions and I was working with a fabric piece that was much wider than standard store bought fabric (basically a giant 80in x 80in square once it was all flat).  In hindsight I should have at least tried my rotary cutter on some of the smaller pieces so it wouldn’t move as much as it did when I used my scissors. (I am still getting used to a rotary cutter and mostly use it for short straight pieces.)  I *definitely* should have had better pattern weights – I tried using my 2 and 6 pound exercise weights and while they kept the paper piece in place, there wasn’t enough precision to keep the linen at the edges from shifting around.

In the end the smallest pieces – the front and back yoke on the top, which were interfaced and lined, did not quite match up, and so the top is a little wonky. The other pattern pieces were big enough that I could compensate for any wobbly cut lines in the seam allowance. 

I kept reminding myself that in a lot of respects, this was basically a wearable mock-up, and that it was better to have a not perfectly sewn, but perfectly wearable set of pjs than put a huge pile of good linen in the garbage.

In the end I’m really happy with my upcycled pjs – they are very comfortable and a nice warm weather addition to my weekend lounge wear. 

Have you ever tried upcycling an old sheet into a sewing project?  What did you make?