The Pants Saga Continues

Butterick 6966, the Palmer/Pletsch pattern, will not work for the pants class. DSIL’s mom—an accomplished seamstress herself—noted that seamlines are useful places to make fitting adjustments. Having fewer seamlines is not always a good thing. I didn’t even bother to make a muslin of that pattern. I traced View D, the straight leg version, onto some Pellon Easy Pattern and did as suggested in the instructions, fitting one leg to my body using a piece of elastic at the waist. I had it hanging beautifully at the center, with the side dart perfectly positioned at the side of my body. (The pattern also had darts on the back and front.) However, that left a huge chunk of fabric billowing out at the hips and side leg. To make matters worse, the back rise was 2" too short.

A side seam would have been incredibly useful for fitting, but the pant leg was one wraparound piece of fabric. Add in that short back rise and it would have been faster for me to draft a pair of pants from scratch than to figure out how to get that pattern piece to look like the pants on the front of the envelope. Perhaps someone more experienced in tissue fitting could have made it work, but I have such lousy spatial perception skills that the whole idea was beyond me.

Back to the drawing board. I totally understand why people don’t like to make pants.

I pulled out this pattern:

Some of you may remember that I made the knot top from this pattern last year. (I liked it, but it was too short.) At the time, I also traced the pants pattern but never made them. I went stash diving through the bin of ponte for something suitable and came up with a three-yard length of black fabric that I think I found at the Walmart in Missoula in August. Robin was on that trip with me. The fabric looks and feels like a ponte on one side and a microfleece on the other.

Before I traced the pattern, I laid the Renee pant pieces over it to compare them. I should have done that with the Palmer/Pletsch pattern because I would have seen, right off the bat, that the back rise was going to be a problem. The Renee pant pieces looked very similar to the New Look pieces in that area, so I felt confident in going forward.

I cut out the pattern—20 minutes—and put it together on the serger—another 20 minutes. The pants fit me perfectly. They are long enough in the rise to come up to my natural waistline; in fact, I went back and scooped out about 1/2” in the front rise to make it sit slightly lower.

[I had a similar pair of Liz Claiborne pants that I finally donated to Goodwill, because the rise on them was just short enough that they constantly felt as if they were falling off my hips. It is lovely to have pants with a waistband that sits where it should.]

If I were going to make them in a ponte or interlock, which I will at some point, I probably would go down a size. That ponte/microfleece fabric is wonderful. If I could find out who manufactures it, I’d be tempted to buy a bolt.

This pattern will work for the pants class, yes? Maybe not. My one quibble with New Look patterns is their limited size range. The largest finished hip measurement on these pants is 43", so anyone with hips bigger than about 45" around is out of luck.

I’ve found one Butterick pattern that is very similar, and it has a shorts option, which is even better. When I teach the Renee pants class, I have everyone make a muslin in shorts length, because there is no sense wasting fabric on the pant legs until we get the top of the pants to fit properly. Of course, this Butterick pattern appears to be out of print, although I did find a copy on Etsy. (ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH)

I will figure out how to teach this pants class come hell or high water. We can always default to the Renee pants, although I really like that New Look pattern. I just know the New Look pattern is probably going to be too small for one of the women who wants to take this class. These are so quick and easy to make, though, that I suspect we could re-draft the pattern to fit her through a bit of trial and error. And the goal of this class isn’t to make a pair of tailored, well-fitting pants; the goal of this class is to introduce students to the agony joys of measuring crotch curves and rises and getting a forgiving pair of knit pants to fit reasonably well, because there is only so much I can do in a six-hour introductory pants class.

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I press on. After I finished the New Look pants, I got out the Linda twist top. I am not going to finish the neckline with the binding/facing as suggested in the pattern. I am going to make a coverstitch hem there, instead. That requires folding down 1/4" of fabric and using the narrow coverstitch hem on my machine. I got as far as pinning it in place yesterday afternoon:

We’ll see how this goes. I am really good at coverstitch hems, but this one is narrower than anything I’ve done before. In theory, it should work. I will test on some scrap fabric, first.

I don’t use those fine glass-head pins very often. They are great for situations like this, but I always manage to stab myself (multiple times) with them.

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In podcast news, I recorded episode 6 yesterday. It will be posted next Tuesday. The podcast has been a great deal of fun, even if I am the only person who is entertained by it. I also—finally!—figured out why it wasn’t posting to iTunes. There was a glitch in the RSS feed which was preventing it from being picked up. It is on iTunes now, however, so if you are feeling charitable and would like to leave a review, I would appreciate it.