The infamous Jalie jeans

I am succumbing to the peer pressure of the Jalie jeans. Since everyone else on the planet has made them and raves about them, I'm finally going to try my hand at them.

So far, I have not had the easiest time of it. I decided to use up stash fabric and make my first pair out of white denim I had on the pile. It's not stretch, and the pattern calls for denim with 20% stretch, so I'm cutting a size larger than I usually would (I would have cut a V but now I'm cutting a W).

Jalie patterns are printed on very large heavy white paper, not pattern tissue. They also include sizes from 2T to way past mine, whatever that is. I was looking forward to making a pair of the regular-rise jeans for my mom if the low-rise pair works out for me.

After unfolding the pattern, though, I couldn't wrap my scissors, head, or tracing paper around how to go about cutting out my size without ruining the ones above it? I ended up tracing directly onto my denim with blue tracing paper. I was having no luck tracing the pattern onto tracing paper for some reason.

Well, anyhoodle, now they're cut out and the true test begins. I'm wondering if I should have bought a stretch denim. But then there's the issue of the large stash of fabric I'm trying to sew down. I have a really nice pair of dark denim, too, but it doesn't have stretch either.

Oh, and there's the added bit where I think about and stress about the pocket decoration stitching all day long. That can't be healthy, right? I think I've decided on some sort of star motif. Kind of like the stars that decorate the butts of People's Republic denim. I like them, so maybe I'll try to replicate something like that? And the h's from Citizens of all Humanity are cute, too. So we'll see.