From my New York fabric shopping trip, I got a metallic print with the Flintstones on it. It’s probably been in that store since 1993 when the copyright on the fabric said it was printed. Here’s what I did with it!

With this pattern being a bit wild, or epileptic as I call it, I could only make really casual clothing out of it. One thing I love wearing at home is scrubs. Problem with this fabric for scrubs, though, was that it was thin, and conducted heat well so I would not be warm in it for long, with me getting cold easily as it were. It was too bad I only realized this after having bought and taken it back home to Halifax, rather than when I was considering buying it in New York!

With the fabric being thin, to help me wear it and stay warm, I lined the scrubs with shirting that was smooth on my skin, and made the scrubs with long sleeves. It ended up looking like a T-shirt for design in the end, not in the least because I also took in the arm holes. They might look fine gaping with short sleeve scrubs, but they would have wrinkled a lot in long sleeves. I fitted it comparing sleeve holes to my dress shirts that fit me well and which didn’t crumple too much when wearing. Dress shirts have to crumple a bit around the arm hole, if not more, so I had to accept that. Funny the things you don’t notice till you have to go make them. But I didn’t have to accept wearing what would have looked like a paper bag jammed into my arm hole on my long sleeve scrubs had I simply followed the Simplicity Pattern 4378 extended to long sleeve.

Now, since this isn’t a sewing instruction blog, or post, I’m not going to explain all the intricacies of lining garments. All I’m going to say is I’m proud I developed the skills and methods on my own, not merely putting one garment inside the other and joining at certain points. That’s like over coating or something, not lining. I can do origami (paper folding), and I do lining my way… and I am becoming quite good at it! Opens up a whole new world of possibilities like coats and such, too!

Then, with my asymmetric design trademark, I put a black strip on the right arm and put all the framed pictures of the Flintstones characters on the print on to that black strip. Yes, I painstakingly cut out all those crazy edged cartoon frames! Make sure you have very sharp scissors, and a lot of patience, if you’re going to try the same thing!

The frames were then put on double-sided Steam-a-Seam Lite 2 iron on fusible, and cut out again! The fusible was a tad sticky so that helped keep things in position, but I still had to cut all the details on the edges. The nice thing about this technique is that the fusible ends up being just a tad larger than your frame, so that when you iron on the frame, the wax on the edge help keep the fabric from fraying. Still, to minimize fraying, I covered each frame’s edge with Dritz Fray Check and let it dry before ironing on the frames (steam iron). In my experience, nothing burst into flames or burned, possibly due to the steam from the iron. Hopefully if you try it, you can say the same but I’m not guaranteeing anything. The Fray Check bottle has a flammable warning on it. That’s for the liquid, obviously. I had it dried and wasn’t sure in testing, but I did have a wet cloth on the ironing board in case anything happened.

After the frames were ironed on to the sleeve piece, according to very precise markings, I went back to stitch the edges with an orange thread that’s barely even visible on close examination. I did not want all that work ruined in the washing machine or dryer! I just rolled up the sleeve to each point and put my sewing machine on the absolute slowest stitching speed to do this. I’ve only washed this garment twice so far and everything is holding together well, including those frames and their edges.

Because I improvised the scrubs to have long sleeves, though, I didn’t have enough fabric for a full scrubs pyjama set. All I could make was the top. I’ll be back in New York in a few months and I hope I can find this fabric again to get enough to finish off the full scrubs. Pics of the scrub tops and original pattern are below, mounted on my Singer Diana Dress Form.