I made these shorts for my niece, who is a very skinny almost two. Her size 2T pants and shorts have been falling down, but anything smaller is too short! I had been admiring the Oliver + S Puppet Show Shorts for a while, and when I got a hole in the knee of one of my pairs of jeans, I decided to repurpose the remaining good fabric into a pair of toddler shorts.
The fronts of my jeans were totally worn through, but the backs of the legs were in good shape, so I cut along the side seams and inseams and across below the back pockets. That gave me enough fabric for the body of the shorts and the pockets. I used a large scrap of quilting cotton for the waistband, leg hems, and pocket edges, partly because I didn't have enough of the the denim and partly because the denim would have been too bulky for these folded parts. (I did interface the waistband with some lightweight interfacing.)
I cut a size 3T because the size chart for these shorts lists the finished measurement for the size 2T shorts as smaller than the hip measurement given in the size chart for a kid to fit in the 2T shorts. The stated sizing didn't make any sense to me. They may be a bit too big for my niece, but I found a reference on some blog to making adjustable waist kids' shorts using buttonhole elastic, so that's what I did! I didn't sew the front bottom of the waistband all the way down. Instead I left a 1-2" gap, put a buttonhole in the top layer and a button on the back layer, and threaded buttonhole elastic through. I put the buttonholes in the elastic over the button at what I guessed might be the right length, pushed about 5 more inches of elastic into the channel, and buttoned the front outside of the waistband over it. It was pretty easy! (Although the extra elastic did make the waist of the shorts a bit more bulky.)
The most labor intensive (and cutest) part of the shorts by far were the pockets:
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