Finland vs. Germany

I got home from a weeklong meeting in Nashville to find the Spring/Summer women's edition of Ottobre, as well as the March issue of Burda Style. I loved them both!

On the Burda front, once again, I loved the designs but can't see myself making anything from this issue.

Ottobre, on the other hand, has at least three designs I could see making up right away.

I'm taking my sons to Florida in April and at the very end of the magazine is a perfect tankini pattern! Ruching on the sides, halter top and bikini bottom. I have lots of swimwear fabric down in a Rubbermaid container, just waiting to be made up. I see this in a splashy orange and white polka dot! If I was bold, which I am not, I might even making the bottoms out of white lycra. Eek.


I also absolutely LOVE this cardi pattern. I plan to immediately make it up for myself, and one for my mom who is hosting us in April (lucky ducks are snowbirds). Even though Florida is warm, she and I are always cold in restaurants, and so my mom is smart and keeps a cardigan in her car at all times. I think this would be a lovely car cardi, probably shortened to hip level.


Last but not least, this cropped pants pattern caught my eye for some reason. Both the illustration and the photos make it appear to have a very current fit, which is sometimes hard to find in pants patterns. I'll give it a go and report back.


If I can get two or three things made up by the first week of April I'll be thrilled. My work schedule for March is already scaring me!

Simplicity 2700 - Close, but no cigar

Now that I'm sewing again, I'm determined to only make things I want to wear. It sound obvious, right? Sadly, for me, it isn't always that simple. I tend to enjoy the process of sewing a whole lot more than wearing the finished product. I will never be one of those people who makes their entire wardrobe, I know that much.

But I do enjoy sewing and I love fabric, so I'd really like to occasionally be able to make something that adds to my wardrobe and certainly doesn't scream I MADE THIS AT HOME.

Here's where my latest project comes in. For work in the winter, I typically wear dress pants and a blouse or sweater. I used to exclusively wear Banana Republic pants and suits because they fit me the best, but their fit and sizing had changed in the last few years so now it looks like I'm wearing mostly J Crew dress pants, suits, and blouses.

I have had this beautiful piece of black pinstripe wool/lycra in my stash for the last two years, so I pulled it out this week, determined to make an exact duplicate of the RTW pants I love so much. I even traced the front and back of my J Crew pants and made a muslin of those, contemplating the idea of drafting my own pants pattern. Then I scratched that idea and poured over every single pants pattern I could find. I spent countless hours on Pattern Review.



And then I chose Simplicity 2700.



That was my mistake.



Here are my thoughts on this pattern. In no particular order because I'm tired and frustrated and considering taking a class in trouser construction/pattern drafting.



The RTW pants I love have side seam pockets, and S2700 have diagonal slash pockets. This is a HUGE difference. The look is just not the same. I cannot get the hips to lay flat to save my life, and I'm convinced it's because of the pockets.



I insist on welt pockets on the back of all my dress pants. Not because I want to stash a bunch of things, but because my fanny looks bad unless it has some extra construction framing it. That sounds strange, but it's true. My butt needs more covering than a single layer of fabric.



The waistband on my RTW pants looks to be constructed separately and then applied to the pants. In S2700, they instruct you to sew the waistband pieces to the leg sections and then stitch the pants together. In my opinion, this creates a look of a yoked pant instead of dress pants with a waistband. Come to think of it, I have some J Crew yoke-style pants with diagonal slash pockets and no back welt pockets, and they aren't my favorite. They tend to "grow" as I wear them, falling down on my hips. I digress. I also found the waistband to be way too wide and the rise to be about an inch too high for my taste. That was an easy fix, though.



If you're new to sewing, DO NOT BUY THIS PATTERN. The instructions for almost every step were ridiculous. The zipper?! Holy cow, they must not have wanted anyone to ever attempt a zipper fly insertion ever again. I didn't even follow the rest of the instructions because I was so peeved with the zipper portion.

The finished product is okay. I'll wear them, I'm sure of that. I just don't love them and I really wanted to love them.



I cut the Slim version, after comparing Slim and Average and realizing there is very little difference. I often find patterns for clothing to create a much more voluminous end product than what you find in RTW.

Final judgment? Close, but no cigar. Next time I think I'll actually try to use my self-drafted trouser pattern to re-create the J Crew pants I love.

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.

A pink pair of pants

I am almost finished with my perfect pink pair of pants. They're technically a muslin for a pair of trouser jeans I loved with all my heart until they died after many years of wearing.

Here are the originals, a pair of Meli Melo trouser jeans with a cute braided pocket band detail that made it nearly impossible to actually use those side pockets. So I omitted that detail for now. By the way, Meli Melo went out of business shortly after I bought these jeans, so I think it's ok to knock them off, right?

They got kinda tight over the years. Stupid washer and dryer! Shrinking all my clothes on me, even the ones I hang to dry. Couldn't be me, certainly not.

I cut them up after they split up the center back and used the pieces as a "pattern" of sorts. I found this stretch rosey denim at Hancock's for $3 a yard. The only drawback now, in hindsight, is that the rose denim has quite a bit of stretch and the original jeans weren't stretch at all, although they acted like it. They were 80% cotton, 20% poly, which is probably why they were so soft and acted kinda stretchy.

Because the originals had gotten a wee bit tight, I cut the pattern pieces with a one inch seam allowance, to allow for some adjustments should I need it. The stretch in the rosey denim took care of that, though, so I ended up not needing it.

I am really really really happy with the almost finished product, considering I was basically winging it. Had I remember these were a 'muslin' I might not have spent so much time getting the welt pockets just right, but I did anyway. They aren't perfect and there are still threads I need to snip, but they look pretty darn good from a distance.

I still have to take the waistband off and do some fixing so I haven't sewn on the button or buttonhole yet. For one, I totally forgot to interface it! Spaced out completely on that. So I wore the pants in to Ben Franklin to buy buttons and by the time I got home the waistband had grown considerably.

Sorry for the gross belly shot.

I created a curved waistband with some cotton on the interior, but I will be adjusting it and curving the center back seam even more to fix the gaposis that occurred while wearing. Not too noticeable in these pictures, but definitely there.

All in all, I'm really happy with them and I'll be trying my hand at a second pair and possibly a pattern posting soon.

Yay, something I'm good at!

I am happy to say I was able to start on a long-awaited project last night that's going to be super fun!

Actually, I started two projects, but the thing is, they're very similar.

One is a re-make of these jeans, my all-time favorite trouser jeans, that have seen such better days it wasn't really a surprise when the center back seam did a splitter on me while I sat on the floor at Barnes & Noble (reading sewing books - ironic?). They had gotten really tight (washing machine keeps shrinking things, eh), and you can kind of see how the silk inside the waistband had deteriorated over the years of washings. I'd already decided I was going to cut them up to make a "pattern" and try to re-create them when they died.

I went to Hancock's and bought an inexpensive piece of rose stretch denim. Rose? you ask. Yes, rose. I don't tend to like denim sold by the yard, it's never the same as denim you see on ready to wear, probably because of the washing/weathering techniques the RTW companies use after construction. So I thought a nice rosey pair of trouser jeans would be fun.

I also have an awesome independent pattern for a pair of trousers with a yoke back that I wanted to make and the perfect stash fabric for them - a stretch denim with this interesting weave, kind of like vertical slub lines running through it? I'd read on Gorgeous Fabrics' blog about laying out stretch fabrics overnight before cutting them out, so I actually did it this time. I laid the denim on my parents' pool table to let her breathe, and then cut the pants pattern the next time I was out at their house. It rested for a long time. I'm currently resting the rosey stretch denim, and hope to have it back home by the end of the week. Initially I thought I'd make both pair of pants in an assembly line but sadly I don't think it's going to work out that way.

I so love making pants. Not because they're easy, just because I wear a lot of pants. And I'd really like to get better at some of the techniques, like curved waistbands, pockets, zippers and fly extensions, not to mention fitting. I put the zipper into the denim pair tonight while watching Sandra Betzina's fly front zipper video tutorial (pretty good, but sadly lacking any description of what side she's talking about?) and it went really well. Now all I have to finish is the side seam pockets and I'll be ready to model them for you. Sounds pretty easy, right?

Hah!

Side seam pockets are a really difficult area for me. I can do welt pockets till the cows come home, but sideseam pockets? Totally foreign. I'm still trying to visualize the steps in my mind before I attempt to do them on the machine. That's kind of how I work, I lay in bed at night thinking through the process before sitting down at the machine to do it. Am I the only one who does that kind of thing?

That's also kind of why shirring was so frustrating for me - there's no technique to learn, it's just straight or zig-zig stitching, and it wasn't turning out right! I understand when a fly zipper doesn't turn out right, but straight stitches?

So if all goes well by the end of the week I should have two new pair of pants to share with you. Maybe I'll just wear them around the house, we'll see. Sometimes my dreams are much better than the reality.

And if the rosey trouser jeans fit well, I'll try to post up a pattern for others to adjust to their own measurements and use. Now I just need to learn how to draw....