Pant thoughts

As I have said here several times I am pretty pleased with my pants fit. I feel confident to go now and try to apply the same tactics to a new pants pattern. But that will have to wait a bit. This morning I am back to work and torn if what I should do next is finish two teaching worthy summer straight skirts or go on to some summer dresses. It has been a while since I have made a dress and I am in the mood.


The truth is that behind this latest version of decent fitting pants lies a heap of about 900 (literally) pants that didn't fit.


So what did I learn? What made a difference? This seems worth sharing.


First of all that old adage about not doing what you have done before if you want a different result is true. Because I was on vacation and feeling reckless, rather than careful, this is what I did differently. This is what you might want to consider in your own pants quest:


1.  Consider that you might not know your body as well as you thought you did. Our body images have to do with a lot of things other than fact. For instance because I am tall I have been told my whole life I have a "long pelvis like Grandma." So every single pair of pants I have ever made has started with at least an inch added all around the top. This invariably produced a droppy butt, extra fabric around the legs, all those baggy front crotch wrinkles. Also bodies change. Like a lot of women of a quality age my legs have actually gotten thinner as my waist has expanded. In actual fact my straight hips require zero extra at the top and in fact a slight lowering of the seam allowance at the sides. I only needed that one inch plus at centre back because of my large butt and at centre front for my belly. Don't start out doing all the standard flat pattern alterations you think you need before you cut out the pattern.


2. Make your first pair just right out of the envelope only make basic width adjustments that you are obviously going to need to get the fitting pair over your body. Choose the appropriate pattern size of course. In my case I bought for my thighs, a 14 and added to the waist width. When in doubt go with a smaller size and add. Taking in for most people is too hard - you can't take in fabric that has already been cut away, at the crotch curve for instance.


I also want to say that IMO pants patterns are better than they used to be, in my experience at least with Simplicity. After 20 years of scooping away at the that old crotch seam because of the big butt (please see earlier shots in earlier posts for dramatic illustration) I just sewed up the Simplicity pants as they were and the crotch seam was perfect. I nearly, actually, fainted as this violates everything I thought I had figured out.


3. Make only little changes and make only one change in each test pair. The famous "clown butt" alteration takes in only 1/2" at the back inseam and adds it to the back crotch seam and that worked very well for me. I needed to see and understand the power of this simple little alteration, without messing it up with 45 other ideas, to know that this is actually something I should be doing from now on. Taking out some of the outer side seam curve, adding a 1/2" more to centre back and front were all additions I made one at a time.


4. Wear a fitting pair for a day before you either sign off on them or start cutting out more pairs. The body moves and what you don't see right away you will feel after a bit. Doing this helped me zero in on the best waistband fit.


5. Speaking of waistbands if you find the top of the pants hard to fit try moving your waist up to your natural waistline. It's now fashionable anyway. Having a natural anchor for your pants smooths out a lot of issues.


6. Don't go nuts with the fitting. I am amazed when I read blog posts that detail lots of "I moved this seam over 1/8" etc. This may be fitting heresy but unless your figure in faultless in the conventional sense over-fitting my in fact articulate your fitting issues (you are so glad I didn't post the pictures of my attempts at skinny jeans) or even worse waste your sewing time.


Listen, you are sewing pants not finding the cure for a life threatening disease at the molecular level. What you want are decent pants that can serve as a backdrop for more interesting to sew tops and which are comfortable to wear.


Be realistic. If you find this hard to do go sit in an airport lounge for a couple of hours. Even your half way fitted pants are going to look better than 99% of the pants you see on most folks in their store boughts.


Also Shams and Betsy thanks for your great comments (everyone read them after my last post) on closures. In my different versions I tried zippers up through the facings, skirt hooks and buttons. In the end I feel better the more secure I am so I think a button and a hook (two extensions is a good idea) are best.


Something is bothering me though.


Somewhere in the back of my brain is an idea for not having a seam at the end of the extension so the buttonhole is easier to make, but I can't remember how that went.


Anyone have any ideas?

Sewing intensive in Tennessee- lightbulb moment on pants fitting

I am back in Knoxville visiting my husband who is still working on a project here. I am having an excellent time but I realize for a normal person this is one nutty way to spend spring break.

I go for long walks and can't get over that the place is not covered in ice and snow.We eat out and just enjoy the people. Tomorrow we are going to Alabama and I am pretty happy about that because I have never been there.

But most of the time I am in my hotel room sewing.

My husband, displaying one of the reasons I married him, borrowed a nice machine from the girlfriend of one of the guys on site and it was set up for me when I arrived. And we know I have 13 boxes of fabric here so I am pretty much in my idea of an ideal situation:

No phones.
No cooking.
No errands.
No job.
No housework.
Nobody who needs me to do anything at all.

Just sewing.

I call this a vacation.

I brought my CD with Wild Ginger's Pattern Master Boutique software with me. I have used it a bit in the past but never really had complete success, particularly with the pants. You get out what you put in I suppose. So I decided, since there was no way I was going to get time to do this at home in my busy life, to just see what I could do for a pants pattern.

I have been wanting a nice simple slim legged pants with a waistband like I see in the collections and do not see in the pattern books. I figured they would go with my white shirts and whatever else I decide to make.

So I started my research and looked a pretty much every pants shot I could find in the blogs and Patternreview.

I was absolutely amazed to see that most people, whatever their shape, had the same problems:

1. Too tight across the butt but with baggy folds under the butt
2. A sort of pouchy thing going on under the stomach, like a handful of extra fabric, and some wrinkles at the top of the legs at the front.

I even saw in some Threads articles with their own patterns this extra fabric at the front crotch. I know those model girls wouldn't wear pants like that if they weren't getting paid for it.

I mean raise your hand if you haven't made 497 pairs of pants with this exact same problem.

So before I did anything else and started 498 I sat down in this hotel room and thought about it.

That's when it occurred to me that we forget about legs, as in we walk around in pants, we don't just stand in front of the digital camera for a picture. And then I thought about arms, which also move (mine have been heaving boxes of fabric around the hotel room) and it occurred to me that pants and a crotch are just a sort of another version of 3D drafting just like sleeves and armholes are.

So what do I know about armholes?

1. A higher tailored set-in sleeve armhole is more comfortable and gives more movement than a looser dropped armhole.
2. A closer armhole, in addition to giving more mobility, has less excess fabric and fewer wrinkles, than a dropped armhole.

When I thought about this some more I realized what pants do most people wear most often? Jeans. Now I know whatever your throw-on default garment is, it is that because it is comfortable. So jeans are comfortable and generally don't have a lot of that extra fabric at the front thing happening. They also have a crotch that is cut closer to the body than other pants.

In PMB there are four crotch styles from loose to close to the body - culottes, trousers, slacks and jeans. Because I was fooling around making slim pants and a looser pattern for linen wide legged pants I was using the slacks and trouser crotches.

I changed both patterns to the jeans crotch, even though neither pair were jeans, and presto the extra fabric at the front disappeared and the pants ( I made 6 muslins during this process) became a lot more comfortable.

I also rethought my crotch length measurement. In all my versions I was measuring my crotch length as specified but ending up with something too long. I then realized that when you add a waistband you want the top of that to be at your waist, and if you add a waistband onto pants that stop at your waist, well you are going to settle them in and give yourself a droopy crotch. So I subtracted my 1" waistband, total of 2" from my crotch measurements and that did the trick.

In addition I learned a few things about PMB that might be useful to other users of this program, understanding this works for my body which is essentially tall, with a butt that sticks out a lot, no real hip shape, as in straight up and down, and the kind of belly that comes with three babies, a section, and leaving the category of spring chicken.

1. I wanted less fabric in the thigh like the RTW slim pants I saw. You get this in PMB by reducing the knee width setting, this pulls in the thigh. I brought mine down to 0.

2. My front darts looked poofy at the bottom. I tried every configuration of dart placement and length with no improvement. Then I re-read the Help notes in the program and it said to release the darts at the fullest part. Since my abdomen is sort of a unit from waist to crotch there is no curve and no high point. I don't need dart shaping where there is no shape. So I set the program for three darts (this made them tiny and also moved the front crotch vertical giving me the fabric where I needed it) erased the dart lines in Pattern Editor and just sewed up my muslin without any front darts. Nice and smooth.

3. Being hip shapless I have always been annoyed by that jodphur thing which I could not get rid of in the PMB pattern. I then went back to the fine print in Help and realized that how the program works is to give you the widest fabric at the front where you have identified your hip depth (I located this not by anything happening at my hip but by my widest-measurement which really is created by the big rear end not anything happening hipwise). So to get rid of this curve I moved my hip depth measurement in Settings up, from 8" to 4.25". If you look at the slim pants pattern I have put here you can see that little curve is close to the top, giving me a little extra so the pants don't pull across my belly. I also lowered the side seams .75" and the front 1". All my RTW pants dip down at CF. You will notice that there is almost no shape to my front crotch, I took out -.02 of the crotch shape (first arrow).

4. The back crotch after all of this was easy since I knew what I would do on paper. I opted for round back crotch, wild cut (meaning extra at CB waist) increased the back crotch extension .25,  changed the back crotch break to -2.5 and moved in the crotch shape 1.8 (second arrow) ( this is the old lower and scoop out combo).

5. Finally I added 2" to length and choose a contoured waistband because they are more comfortable.

What I have ended up with are pants that I think fit pretty near as perfect as you get on an imperfect body, all this info saved into defaults and a program I can now use to draft different pant styles.

It took isolation in a hotel room to get here, and I hope some of this information might be useful to you too.

Pictures of some finished pants are forthcoming when DH comes back.

Clearing the decks

Busy week so far and my duct tape pattern is looking at me waiting to be tested. 

I taught a night class last night after a full day of teaching, tore home to watch the U.S. presidential debate ( clear to me that we could all use someone calm and reasonable in tough times, these times), got up this morning and moved all my investments out of the market (don't even speak to me about all the fabric I could have, should have, bought with what I lost from my hard earned little savings over the weekend) and spent the rest of the day making up mid term exams, and trying to get my work caught up enough so I can stop work at noon on Friday and have a full long Thanksgiving weekend here just to sew and test my pants patterns.

I am really going to need some serious sewing this weekend after all that has been going on, in this post wedding house, at school and in the world.  I am also engaged in the pants sewing discussions at the Stitchers' Guild and have decided that I am going to use this first pair, assuming that my pattern works, to try and figure out the best way to deal with pants that "grab" not-flat-rears at the back.

The conventional method is to keep sewing deeper and deeper back crotch seams to make more room ( you know that advice about scooping out the back crotch seam by sewing 1/4"s into the back crotch seam until you have enough room) versus this advice, tip #3, which tells you to do just the opposite.

I have to get close to that sewing machine to figure all this out. There is just way too much sewing advice on pant fitting out there for this head, and it is definitely time I found something that just worked.

The bod

Before I started the pants pattern project I thought it only fair and objective, and in the interests of science, to let you share my fitting issues.

This is something you have to see. So breaking all rules about not posting things on the internet you wouldn't want anyone else to see, here are pictures of my 55 year old bod, taken on my front doorstep for the complete amusement of my very nice and tolerant neighbours.

My challenges are obvious but not unlike many that other women and sewers share.

Feel free to make any comments or give any advice you want. Obviously my interest in sewing is larger than my ego or I wouldn't be doing this.

The best part of these pictures are the dogs in the background who, as usual, have no idea what is going on in this house and are only sure in this experiment that they are on the wrong side of the door.