Hoodie Sleeping Bag

This hoodie dress has snaps inside holding up enough fabric to zip over your feet, for those times when you just want to fall over and go to sleep.

MATERIALS

- 3 yards zipper (my local fabric store has a big roll of this)

- two zipper pulls

- 4 yards fleece fabric

- 4 snaps

- matching color thread

TOOLS

- sewing machine with a regular foot and a zipper foot

- tape measure

- mirror

Before you start, figure out which side is the 'right side' and 'wrong side' of your fabric. I had to redo a seam during this project because I didn't realize the fleece had two different sides of fabric which look different. I picked the softer side to be the inside.

Figure out what the widest part of the garment needs to be by measuring around your hips. You can add inches depending on how loose you want it. Then, figure out how long the garment needs to be by measuring from your shoulder to the floor. You will want it to be longer than the height to the floor because you need extra fabric to go around your feet in sleeping bag mode.

Now that you have the width and length, cut two rectangles of fabric to those dimensions.

Next, figure out how wide you want your neck hole to be, by measuring around your neck. Make it loose enough that you can put your head through. Mark the neck hole on your fabric, and sew it together on the shoulders.

Figure out how far past the edge of your shoulder the fabric goes. This is what we want to cut off. On your fabric, mark where your shoulder is and draw a curve for where the sleeve will go. My curve ends at about my waist, so that there is wider fabric where my hips will be.

Find some piece of clothing that has the same sleeve size that you want. I used a jacket. Take two layers of fabric (one for each sleeve), and fold it in half so that the fold is on the top. Trace the shape of your sleeve. To draw the part of the sleeve that matches the curve of the sleeve hole, you can put the sleeve hole on the fabric and trace it. Cut your two sleeves out.

Where the fold is on the sleeve is where it meets your shoulder. Pin it to the shoulder of the torso piece to make sure your sleeve is centered, and continue pinning the rest of the sleeve. Sew sleeves to shoulder.

Figure out where you want the zipper to start on your dress. I've designed mine so that if the zipper is unzipped all the way there are side slits.

Pin from the wrist of your sleeve to your armpit, down the side of the torso until where the zipper should start, and sew to close the sides of your hoodie.

Now that you have the basic shape of the garment, you can figure out how long you actually want it. Trim any excess off.

With the garment wrong-side-out, pin the zipper all around the front bottom edge, making sure that there is extra zipper sticking out on each end. Check that you've pinned it so that the zipper will be oriented the right way when everything is flipped right-side-out. Sew the zipper on with the zipper foot. At the beginning and end of the seam, don't sew too close to the beginning of the side slit, so that the side slit can be centered over the zipper (instead of being stuck to one side)

Pin the zipper at the bottom two corners of the back, to make sure that the zipper will be lined up properly on the front and back. Sew the zipper onto the back.

On each end of the zipper, tack over the end half a dozen times so that the zipper will not come apart. Cut some fabric into rectangles (you'll want to make yours bigger than I have them and trim them down later -- the rectangles I have pictured were too small and I had to recut them). Fold the rectangles over the end of the zipper and sew back and forth twice. Trim off extra fabric. This is all to prevent the zipper from fraying and the zipper pulls from falling off. Also any sharp edges of the zipper end won't poke you now that they are covered in fabric.

Trace out four hood pieces as pictured. I learned the shape and technique for the hoodie from With Wendy's video about sewing a DIY hoodie . You can kind of hold them up to your head to see if you have it big enough. Bigger is better because you can always cut it later. Make them wider than mine so that you can skip the step of adjusting your hood because it was too small (oops).

Pair up your hood pieces and sew along the back, right sides together.

Flip one hood so that the seam is on the inside, and then put this hood inside the other hood. Sew along the rim that will frame your face. If you accidentally made your hood too small you can sew an extra strip of fabric here to make it bigger.

Flip your hood right side out.

Put on the garment and put on the hood as well. Mark on the neckline where the hood should be sewn on. Cut the neckline, leaving a seam allowance for the hood. Pin the hood on its corners and at the center back neck, and sew it on.

Cut a little V neck (size according to preference), with seam allowance. Fold the seam allowance down and sew.

Fold the raw edge of the sleeve onto the wrong side of the fabric and sew all the way around.

Measure on yourself to decide how big you want your kangaroo pocket, and cut it out, ensuring that it is symmetrical and leaving extra room for seam allowance.

I sewed all the edges down to finish them. I decided to give the part of the pocket where your hands would go in a 1/2 inch seam, and I gave the rest of the edges a skinnier seam.

Pin the kangaroo pocket onto the garment where you want it, and topstitch the top, bottom, bottom left, and bottom right edges down onto the garment.

The snaps hold up the extra sleeping bag fabric while you are wearing the hoodie in dress form. Use your mirror to decide how far up you want the fabric to snap (this depends on your ideal dress length).

I put the male side of the snaps on the bottom corners of the garment, and the female side of the snaps under my bust, because that was where I needed the snaps to be for the dress length I wanted.

Sew the snaps on by hand. This took me forever, like 15-20 minutes for each side of each snap. I sewed three times into each of four holes, and then sewed three times into each of the four holes again. If I ever need to use snaps again I will find someone with one of those snap-press machines, buy the right kind of snaps for their machine, and beg them to let me use it so I don't have to hand sew them on.

Cut off all the loose threads. If you have serged seams, you can use a big needle to tuck the tail of the serged threads into the seam to secure it before trimming off the extra.

Congrats, you now have a sleeping bag hoodie! Stay cozy.