this post originally appeared as a part of Sew Pony’s When We Were Young series last summer.  today i’m bringing it home.

>>  <<

Hi, I’m Kristin and I’m happy to be here at the tail end of When We Were Young!  Such a fun series, I’ve really gotten a kick out of everyone’s posts!  I actually sewed my outfit months ago, I was so excited for this.  Didn’t get photos until recently though, and my daughter had a growth spurt in those couple months, but ah well.  I knew exactly which outfit I wanted to recreate and couldn’t wait to sew it.

This is me in 1986.

As you can see by my mom’s note at the bottom, I was 4 and a half.  My daughter is 5 now, so we were pretty darn close in age!  We lived on an acre of land out in the semi-country with a couple lambs that helped “mow our lawn,” as my parents put it.  I loved basically going outside in the summer mornings and not coming in except to eat.

Here I am in my little romper and saltwater sandals, living summertime outdoors.  My mom said my romper was a hand me down (I was the oldest so it was likely from a relative).  You can see my early love of climbing too!

With a series of photos like that, of course I had to make a romper for my little gal.  I knew the print would be almost impossible to find, so I took some creative liberty both with that and with the design (wanted to make it a bit more modern).  Here’s what I came up with…

The fabric is a thrifted vintage bed sheet, with store bought bias tape for the bindings.

Her saltwaters sandals (affiliate link) are a different color too, but it all goes together and better reflects my daughter’s girlier personality (I was more of a tomboy when I was little).

The pattern is the Retro Romper by Blank Slate Patterns (affiliate links), and it was such a joy to sew!  I love the instructions for attaching the bodice to the shorts and simultaneously creating a casing for the elastic, and it came together super quickly.  I made some fit changes to take it even MORE retro – the bodice is a 4T but the shorts are a 2T (with 4T width).  Aside from the shortened rise, I also shortened the shorts to the 18m skort cutting line, re-rounding the edges to keep the sweet running short look.  Short shorts are so quintessentially ’80s, amirite?

I think I should’ve lengthened the bodice a bit to compensate for my short shortening and give her a bit more growing room, but how was I to know she was going to grow an inch and a half in, like, 2 months??

She likes it and my husband has said it’s one of his favorite things I’ve made for her, probably because she gets all silly when she wears it – something about a romper makes her all acrobatic, much more so than with a dress.  She hadn’t worn a romper since she was a tiny baby, so it was fun to make one she could wear as a big five year old.  Rompers are fun!

Thanks so much for having me, Suz!