Custom Jeans: part five
Some people like to tinker in the garage. I, apparently, will spend many hours tinkering with the same pattern. It. Will. Be. Perfect.
Shave off the hips, shave off the center back seam (again), widen the calf (even more). Did you know that human bodies are not cylindrical? Add more the the rise in the front, nope not there, take it out. Take more measurements of pants that I like, compare to pattern, adjust.
I've lost track of the changes I've made so far. I even went to open sew to have an expert help with fitting, and the changes to the pattern were so extensive that you can hardly recognize where I began. Ok, that's not entirely true but the changes to the paper pattern have exceeded what I can do to my prototype. So now I'm at: work on the paper pattern with fresh fabric, and salvage the prototype into something wearable (I hope).
The plan for salvaging was to unpick the side seams and then just pin them as close to fitting as possible, trim and resew. My rather excellent husband was a rather excellent helper and pinned everything up for me. I marked off the pin-line with chalk and then marked off a new seam allowance and trimmed each piece down on my serger. After everything was trimmed up I stitched up the legs for a decent fit.
It's a long way from perfect, and there is still the problem of the front being too wide and having no real recourse there. It's not SO bad, but it's not something a waistband will fix. I'm wavering back and forth between cutting my losses with this prototype and trying the latest version of this pattern, and taking the time to draft a waistband (which will not work with the final draft) to finish the prototype to something wearable if not a bit dowdy (that too large front is really dowdy). I'm leaning toward cutting my losses right now.
You can see the heavy edits to the original pattern here. I added an inch of rise in the back as well as another inch to the horizontal portion of the crotch curve in the back. Since I added an inch to the rise in the back, I had to adjust the waist line and blend it to the center front where I did not add any rise (which I'm now realizing that I did not include the back yoke in that blended line). I also took out a second inch from the thigh in the back (a Queen of England alteration). The calf was widened yet again based on the changes I made to the prototype, and it should be perfect now. I took an inch out of the front, which hopefully gets the pockets in the right place. Last I put back what I shaved off the hip in the back. It was too narrow compared to pants that fit, and between that and the too large front I had backward-leaning sideseams.
Next up: custom jeans version 2.0. See what came before here.
In unrelated news, our back gate was tagged with a swastika recently. (Really? Yes, really.) We had my very talented friend Michelle McCausey paint a mini mural over it. If you're in the Portland area and in need of your very own mini mural, get in touch with her, she's fantastic.