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How to Make Matching Family Christmas Pajamas with Embroidery — Step-by-Step Guide
This year, I’m stitching holiday magic into matching family Christmas pajamas!
Every Christmas my husband and I look forward to my son and his family's annual Christmas pajamas photo shoot. This year I decided to go a step—or a stitch—further. I’m going to embroider matching family pajamas for them myself, with a little help from the youngest member! Follow along as I customize a pajama set for the parents and their two daughters.
Supplies
Check out the DBJJ team’s favorite supplies in the Designs by JuJu Amazon store.
- Red Lands’ End sweatpants (purchased from Kohl’s® and Lands’ End)
- Gildan® long-sleeved T-shirts (purchased from Michaels® and Amazon)
- Fabrics for the designs, prewashed
- Fleece
- Heat-n-Bond® Lite
- Designs by JuJu+ magicMESH Cut-Away Stabilizer
- Temporary adhesive spray
- Fabric marker
- DBJJ designs used in this project:
My son (M) and his family range from 6’ 3” tall down to their younger daughter who started kindergarten this year. Finding sweatpants in the same color for all these sizes was challenging. Bless all of you who make flannel pants for your families! I settled on ordering the adult sized sweatpants from Lands’ End and the girls’ pants from Kohl’s. Even though both sets are made by Lands’ End, the colors are not quite the same red, but I decided it was not a deal breaker. Luckily white is white, because Michaels only had the long-sleeved shirts in the adult sizes, which meant that I ordered the smaller sizes through Amazon. The shirts from Michaels feel softer, making me wish they were all from that store.
I’m using the Daisy Doodle Bean Stitch Applique Alphabet to make all their first initials as the center of the design, and customizing each shirt using the embellishment kits. With all the Christmas designs JuJu offers, you may wonder how I made the choice. Recently, my younger granddaughter has started being sensitive to clothing textures. I thought the Daisy Doodle Bean Stitch would work well as it’s not a heavily textured stitch. I also chose embellishments for her shirt that did not have a lot of satin stitchwork in them. With my encouragement she helped a lot with this project, choosing her and her sister’s designs, pushing the buttons on the machine, and fetching threads. I hope being a part of making her shirt will give her more incentive to accept the different textures.
Embrilliance made it very easy for me to design their shirts and see the sizes of the designs.
Once I had all their initials embellished with designs in the Embrilliance software, I copied my son’s M design onto a thumbdrive and double-checked that I hadn’t gone too big for my hoops. Hooray! His design would fit into both the 9x14 hoop and the 8x8 hoop.
Next, I cut out rectangles and pinned them to the shirts to see if overall the scale would be appropriate for all the shirts. Since I hadn’t wanted to go too big on K’s shirt, I kept all the designs somewhat on the smaller size.
Now the fun could really begin! Of course I started with K’s shirt because it would be the quickest and I wanted to check the stitching and make sure this would work as I intended. I folded her shirt in half to find the center and using the rectangle cut to the design’s measurements, I marked and floated her shirt on my 5x7 hoop using magicMESH Cut-Away Stabilizer and temporary adhesive spray.
Using the rectangles had an upside that I hadn’t planned on. Once I had the rectangle placed, I folded it in half and drew a line on the shirt. I used the line to match up to the lines I drew on my hooped stabilizer. I placed K’s design 2” from the base of the neckline. On the other three shirts I went down 2½”.
The smaller the shirt, the less room you have to maneuver. Make sure you check your embroidery area and find a way to keep the rest of the shirt from getting caught in the stitching. My favorite thing to use is painter’s tape.
I used basting boxes on all the designs since knit shirts have a lot of stretch.
You have options when you use the Daisy Doodle alphabet and the embellishments as to whether or not you want the bean stitch to stand out. Earlier this year I made a retirement beach bag for a coworker and used black for all the stitching. It made the bright, beachy colors really stand out. This time, because the initials are in a plaid, which is busy in itself, I chose to use red thread so it would blend in.
On another note, the plaid ended up being a bit wonky. Even though I tried to cut the squares for the applique even with both the horizontal and vertical lines, it wouldn’t lie straight. On each letter I made sure the plaid was straight up and down on any vertical leg as that would be the most noticeable.
Ack! You heard that sound because I forgot to NOT trim too closely. With Daisy Doodle you want to trim ⅛” or a little more away. JuJu also recommends using a fusible product like Heat-n-Bond Lite on the back of the applique “for a more polished look,” which I did for the applique embellishments. I decided not to do that for the initials, opting for a frayed, i.e., “warm and fuzzy,” look, but I did use it for the backs of the embellishments. Remember, you always have personal choices when you embroider! As for my mistake, I decided to soldier on, since the edges on the letters will fray anyway so any unevenness will not get much attention.
With any letters like the R, you’ll want to trim out the centers. Carefully use a stitch ripper to catch only that first layer of applique fabric to make a small hole. Once you’ve done that, you can use small scissors to continue trimming. I’ve found this pretty easy when I follow JuJu’s advice to use a fusible stabilizer on the applique fabric. This was a bit more nail biting as I really needed to do this slowly to avoid poking a hole in the shirt itself. I really did need to be careful on this, as the T-shirt material is very thin and the point of the stitch ripper kept trying to catch it.
When it was time to embroider the antlers on A’s shirt, I saw that some of the stitches on the basting box had pulled loose. Not a good thing, because the goal of the basting box is to help prevent puckering, and the antlers are heavily stitched. I used the controls on the machine to go back to the basting box step and rebasted where the stitches were loose.
Each time I had a shirt completely embroidered, I made sure to press the appliques with the Heat-n-Bond Lite fused to the backs with an iron so they wouldn’t fray much when the pajamas get washed. I suggest pressing while the shirt is still hooped because it’s easier while the rest of the fabric is held back from your design.
After the designs are embroidered, remove any basting stitches, and trim the cut-away stabilizer about ¼” away from the designs.
Don’t forget the family dog when you’re making matching family pajamas! This bandana is super quick to make in the hoop. Here’s our No Dip Dog Bandana blog showing you how to make it with and without embroidering a name. Subie’s bandana is made out of the featured fabric used for the initials.
One of the things you probably don’t know about the Designs by JuJu bloggers is that JuJu gives us the autonomy to show folks all the different ways we use her designs. This means that almost all the pieces we make and show in our blog articles are authentic projects we are making for our homes, families, co-workers, and friends. We just get the pleasure of showing you how we make our creations!
I’m telling you this because I didn’t do something I had planned to show you for customizing family pajamas. I really wanted to embroider the girls’ names down their pants’ legs using the Puffy Magnolia Script Embroidery Font, but unfortunately the 5-year-old did not want something extra touching her leg and these are really and truly her family’s Christmas pajamas for this year. However, it’s an idea you can keep in mind if you want to add something to pajama bottoms. Here's our blog post about puffy foam embroidery. If I were doing it on my single-needle machine, I would use a stitch ripper to open up the pants leg seam, embroider, restitch the seam with a straight stitch, and then go back and zigzag. It’s the same technique I showed for embroidering sleeves on a Mama sweatshirt and a fun Elf Hand sweatshirt.
And since Christmas won’t be here for a few more months, here’s hoping the granddaughter will change her mind. If she does, I'll post photos either in a short blog showing the technique or in the Designs by JuJu Embroidery Blessings Facebook Group where I look forward to seeing all your projects! Please share them with us there or anywhere on social media using the hashtag #designsbyjuju! We love to see what you create!
