It’s no secret that I’m no fashionista. Yes. I can hear the laughter from my friends reading this. I own two pairs of trousers and live in flip flops. And yet, people regularly compliment me on the clothes my children wear, and whenever I say I’m getting rid of small children clothes, people say they’d like to have a look through, because my girls always dress well thanks to an online baby dress boutique.
The main thing with children’s clothes though, is that I never spend a fortune on them. I’m sure if I had a fortune to spend, I might, but since I dont, well… I don’t. With children, however, they grow out of clothes so quickly, we’ve all had to ‘hand down’ items that have hardly, if ever, been worn.
And children get dirty and messy. I’d hate my kids to grow up saying they were never allowed to play in mud because they were wearing an expensive dress! (To clarify, they do have ‘outside’ clothing too. I don’t want them to ruin perfectly good clothing, for no reason.)
Another thing my children love doing is ‘customising’ their clothes and arms and legs and faces with marker pens and glitter pens, so, often, perfectly good clothes can’t be handed down because parts of them are defaced!
You could get them to decorate clothes as gifts – like these boy’s jeans from George, which would make a nice personalised gift for a little friend having a birthday party this weekend without costing a fortune. (For the record, George really surprised me last summer by bringing out a range of gorgeous summer dresses that were extremely affordable! I can’t remember the details but they were a line by a winner of a competition, and they were fantastic. I’m hoping for the same again this year!)
My friend Emily and I were discussing what I can do with all these otherwise ruined clothes one day when she mentioned a rather nifty trick for children’s clothing: Applique is a great way of saving those children’s clothes you love, but they have outgrown.
What she does is to cut out the pretty little pictures and so on, and sews them on to plain t-shirts or jeans! What a great idea and a fabulous way to extend the life of the things we buy cause we know they are just.so.cute.
So, here’s my question: What do you do with children’s clothes that are too small? In South Africa we’d take them to the orphanages, and they’d be welcomed and appreciated no matter the state of them, but here they are just ragged. Where do too small children’s clothes go?
