
my sweet 11 year old is studying world war 2 at school. they had an activities/dress up day this week, with the school hall set up as a mini community complete with anderson air raid shelter. They cooked wartime food, learned about rationing, danced the jitterbug and listened to eldery folk from the local community talk about their memories.

the children have all been working on their own projects about an aspect of the war that interests them. smallest has been finding out about the role of women in the war so on the dress up day she said she would lke to go dressed as a Land Girl. After dismissing the uniform of jodphurs, sweater and hat we decided to go the more casual dungarees and pretty blouse look inspired by the film, 'Land Girls'.
so in true 'Make do and Mend' style i refashioned a pair of my husbands dark taupe coloured jeans into some dungarees. Here's how i did it;
1. I folded his jeans in half matching up the inside leg and outside leg seams.
2. I folded a pair of my daughters jeans in the same way and laid them over the top matching up the inside leg and centre front zip edges to use as a size guide.
3. With tailors chalk i marked around her jeans with a new outside leg line, hem line and waistline. I then cut off the excess on the larger jeans (leaving seam allowances).
4. Using the cut off hem i refashioned the 'bib' of the dungarees and also the side seam plackets for the buttons.I used the cut off outside leg fabric for the straps and luckily had just enough.
5. i then stitched up the side seams, attached the bib, and straps and finished off with buttons.

I was really chuffed and so was she. We dresssed her hair (quite wildly) in 1940's style and realised that the archetypal headscarf would not go over the top so discarded that. Her green weelies completed the look but i was later told that they made doing the jitterbug quite difficult!