This post was originally part of the Calling All Kids series at Alida Makes.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I’m a mom to two boys and wife to a football coach (and a former theatre teacher myself).
One of the things that I love about theatre is that you get to be all kinds of characters as an actor, or create all kinds of worlds from the technical side. You’re not bound by reality or stereotypes.
So when Alida talked to me about her idea for this series (pushing stereotypes of what boys or girls are “allowed” to wear), I knew I wanted to push the stereotype that florals are for girls.
Not so!
That may look like polka dots, but there are also flowers in there. See?
This is the short sleeve version of my Prepster Pullover, made in Flea Market Fancy Flowers by Denyse Schmidt for Free Spirit.
While I think it’s great for boys to wear florals, I also thing finding appropriate ones can be hard! I bought this at Quiltcon (a quilting convention with vendors) and even with all the fabric they had there (it was seriously like a fabric mall – the closest thing I’ve ever come to a fabric district) I had a hard time finding a floral I thought would work for my son. He likes this one and so do I, but I also made sure to break up the busy-ness with some solid colors.
My rules while we were hunting for fabric –
- a “boy” color like blue or green – I was already pushing the envelope with florals, so I didn’t want to push color at the same time
- Scale – there were some other ones that I thought might work as far as color/pattern, but the prints were just too large
- Something I could coordinate solids with. I think I might have even liked to do the yoke of this shirt in the aqua solid, but I didn’t have enough of it.
And he managed to break up the photo shoot a little
And in the end I got this killer response, so we’re both happy.
Any guesses about why the particular colors in this fabric attracted me? And have you ever sewed something that pushed gender stereotypes for your kids? What was it and how did it turn out?
Tanya
My youngest son is a boy/girl twin and loves the colour red, when he was younger his favourite shoes were the ‘flower shoes’ I made that were chocolate brown leather with a small red flower at the point where the elastic joins, I’ve made him a tunic where he chose a snuggly flannelette fabric and spartkly red buttons and his favourite shoes now are red leather with specifically designed sparkly red glitter leather shoe paint – boyish style Dorothy shoes, he also likes to go out with his twin with them both in ‘butterfly’ wing singlets
Palak
My son loves purple! I think this is the perfect print for that shirt. I can see why you liked it!