Spring Pants

These pants have been a long time coming. I finished them in the fall but then it was too cold to wear them and I put them away until I got around to photographing them.

The fabric is 100% linen, a bit on the stiff side, grey-ish brown with white pin-stripes. The pattern is BWOF #112-03-2009 (below left), and originally, this was my inspiration (below right):  flowy legs and "papet-back" style waist.

I had to make quite a few adjustments to the pattern between muslin #1 (straight off the pattern) and muslin #2 (altered pattern):

- added 2.5 cm of crotch depth (which in retrospect might not have been necessary? not sure)

- Removed 2.5 cm from the crotch length (I followed this tutorial and this one

- altered the pleats by making the middle pleat 2 cm narrower, moving the side pleat 2cm towards center front, and adding a 3rd pleat closer to cf. This was to both remove some of the volume in the front and spread it out a bit better. I also still had in mind at that time, that the waist band would be pleated for a "paper-bag" effect, and I wanted those pleats to line up with the pants pleat.

-Took in 2cm off the side (and had to move the pockets accordingly)

-I also added 6 cm to the front so that the waistband would sit at the waist and note below, and 4cm to the sides. Apparently this is what you do for a full tummy, which isn't my case but the front just sat really low compared to the back, and the alteration made it feel much better...

 

That was all alterations made to the pattern before muslin #2. I cut muslin #2 and sewed it up and I was actually quite pleased with it, especially all my playing around with pleats in the front turned out pretty good. Two things I did wrong on that muslin though, that affected the final result: 

First I used a fabric that was a lot lighter than my final fabric, more drapy, so it actually concealed some of the flaws that later showed on the final fabric.
Second, to save time I didn't include the full pocket on the second muslin, I just sewed the pocket openings shut so I didn't have to add the lining. As a result, it looked great in the muslin, but on the final garment the pockets wouldn't lay nice and flat and kept sticking out.

 

 

Because of that I had to do quite a few more alterations on the final fabric, including moving the back darts around a bit, playing with their length, adjusting the waistband for sway back, and trying to get these darn pockets to look right. Another mistake was to use white broadcloth as the pocket lining, when I should have gone with brown to match the pants, but that's all I had on hand (i didn't want to use self-fabric as it would have been too stiff). Unfortunatly because the pockets  don't lie nice and flat, the white of the lighting shows a bit... Which I guess is ok, since the pin stripes are also white. In the end I tacked the pockets about down about 3-4 cm from the waistband, which makes the opening smaller, but still useable, and prevents most of the sticking out.

After all that fiddling, I was ready to be done with these pants, and I eventually dropped the idea of a paper-back waist. My fabric was a bit too stiff and my couple of attempts at it didn't look right, so I just went back to the original waist band but made it slightly wider.

In the end, even with all the aterations, I'm still pretty happy with these pants. They actually turned out very comfortable and pretty close to what I had in mind. They are almost too warm for a hot summer day (the linen is somewhat thick), but they will be perfect for spring or a cooler summer day/night as we have so many of here in Vancouver..