Navy trousers

The last item I'll post today is the trousers that I started at the tail end of 2019 before we had heard of COVID-19.

To recap, I wanted navy wool pants that had the very comfy waist/hips of the Style Arc Kew pants pattern but a more standard leg. I struggled to combine the Kew pattern with a Burdastyle pants pattern from 2005. Then I invented a way to line them while still allowing for fitting while I sewed. The end result is not perfect but they are, as I had hoped, very comfortable and I am pretty sure I will get a lot of wear out of them.

Did I invent this technique?

I'm making a pair of wool dress pants, and as usual I'm lining them. Or rather I'm half lining, half underlining them. I have invented an order of construction that lets me assemble the pants almost completely, including inserting the lining, but continue to check and refine the fit at critical seams without taking the lining out. (I'm not saying I'm the only person ever to have had this idea, but it's one I didn't acquire from anyone else, so I'm claiming it as my invention!)

I cobbled the pattern together from two different ones I've made before. The first is a Burdastyle pattern from 2005 that I made in 2012. I had adjusted this pattern for fit when I first made it and they still work for me. However I wanted a more standard fly front/pocket combination, and loving the comfort of my Style Arc Kew pants, I attempted to graft the waist/pocket/fly from it onto the Burdastyle legs.

So I did not make a muslin. I figured it was a risk worth taking because I'd made these pants before (sort of). However I don't fully trust my pattern-drafting skills so I wanted to be able to refine the fit as I went. The outer leg seam is for me the main and critical one, since it allows me to refine the hip curve and hip/waist circumferences. However the CB seam is also a good one to be able to adjust.

First, I made the pockets and fly front. To sew the fly I had to sew the front crotch seam but I did not sew it all the way to the inseam. I left it open a few centimetres so I could later attach each front leg to a back leg along the inseam. I like to sew the crotch seam in one pass from the bottom of the fly to the back waist. As Style Arc says, this improves the crotch shape. If you sew the front and back crotch seams before sewing the inseam, the result is to flatten the crotch curve seam allowances where the seams intersect. It's better to have that crotch curve seam allowance vertical - you can trim it for comfort and fit.

After sewing the back darts, I sewed the fronts to the backs at the inseam in each of my layers - the fashion fabric and the lining.

Then I basted the lining to the pants (one layer of lining, one layer of fashion fabric, wrong sides together) along the back crotch curve and all side seams I used a 2 thread serger stitch to neaten all the raw edges.

Next I sewed the crotch seam through all layers. At this point I'm treating the lining as underlining. The seam allowances will be accessible inside the pants rather than being sandwiched between two separate layers (fashion fabric and lining).

The fact that the front crotch was already partially sewn in the fashion fabric meant that I could stop sewing this seam a few centimetres away from the lower point of the front fly. I'll be attaching the lining to the inside of the fly later by hand.

After all that I was left with something that looked like this.



As you can see, this treatment is partially lining the pants (inseams, darts and all front details are sandwiched between the lining and fashion fabric) and partially underlining them (at CB and side seams).

Now to baste the side seams and check that pesky fit... I'll be back soon.

Old idea, new grey pants

There's a reason to keep old pattern magazines. I earmarked the pattern for these pants soon after I acquired the December, 2005 edition of Burda World of Fashion, as it was then known. And I finally made them, only a decade later.

The fabric might have been waiting almost as long. It's a soft wool in a nice heathery grey, probably acquired at the Fabric Flea Market. It too has long been earmarked for dress pants.

I traced size 38 at the waist and 40 at the hip, and made a quick and dirty muslin in the form of these truly delightful striped shorts. They revealed that while I had the right amount of fabric circumference, more or less, it was poorly distributed.



Specifically, the back. For some reason, pants drafts typically assume that one has a curvy backside. That CB seam therefore slopes away from the crotch at a bit of an angle. When you sew the backs together at that seam, it creates a big dart for your bum. If you have a flat derrière like The Sewing Lawyer, sad wrinkles form at or below the bum, the side seams swing to the front, and the backs of the pants legs get hung up on the backs of the legs of the wearer.

I have written about this before, I think. Ah yes. That is a very elaborate fix I performed. And it didn't work all that well either. This time I flew by the seat of my pants (hahaha) and I'm very pleased with the results.

Altered pattern - pants back

The basic components of the elaborate fix are:

1. Straighten the CB seam (reduce the dart).
2. Curve the side seam to keep the overall width the same.
3. Scoop the back crotch.

So that's what I did. No slicing or folding was involved. I guesstimated I needed about 1cm less of an angle at the CB and I took a bit more than that off at the side seam as the pants were a bit too big at the waist. I also moved the back dart towards the CF by the same amount. 

You can see the results at right. The black lines trace the original pattern and the red ones reflect my changes. 

So these pants. They fit.



I used bemberg lining to underline them since the wool is very soft. The weight and slippery quality of the underlining pulls down on the curved pocket flaps, something I hadn't counted on. I totally need the buttons to hold them flat to the pants front. I didn't originally intend to put buttons on so the pockets are actually closed with a snap and the button is decorative.

Side zipper - pretty good!

Waistband eased into fusible tape

The curved waistband pieces can easily stretch out. I stabilized the upper edge of the interfaced waistband with fusible tape cut to the pattern upper edge measurement, easing the waistband into it. Pressing eliminates those ripples. 

The pants close with an invisible zipper at the side seam. Putting a zipper in the side seam always makes me a bit nervous because it means I can't fine tune the hip curve once the garment is assembled. I double checked the curve by trying them on after sewing the side seams and leaving the front open. It worked!

The sewcation continues and my stash beckons. I think my next project is a machine knitted cardigan in ... wait for it ... heathery grey wool. Or a jacket. Or both...