Hooray, I finished my jeans!! I actually finished them last weekend, which was my goal, but, since I got sick, it’s taken me until this weekend to get some pictures. After all the disappointment with the too-big fit, I tore the waistband off (again!), took them in on the sides, and voila! Jeans that fit! Sort of… (more on that in a minute).
As mentioned in my previous post, I decided to sew these because I wear jeans a lot, but don’t fit into any of my pre-pregnancy jeans. Since I don’t have any others, I’ve been wearing them cinched tightly with a belt, which makes a funny gather in the back and a saggy butt. Finally, I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, since I hadn’t made a pair of pants before.
In the end, they turned out okay. The fit is great now. They ride a little higher on my hips than my store-bought jeans, which I appreciate because it’s just unattractive to have your butt borderline hanging out every time you bend over (the ultra-low rise is getting to be a bit much for me)! They fit great through the hips and thighs too. My only reason for bumping them down to an “okay” rating is the dang zipper. (Notice how I conveniently hide that in the pictures with my long shirt!) Although the fit feels and looks good through the hips, the fly gapes a bit and shows the zipper tape. It’s not really pulling because it’s too tight because they do this, though not quite as much, when they are off too. To make matters worse, the zipper tape is a different color than the jeans because my fabric store was out of the darker one and I was too lazy to go across town to see if the other store had the correct color. Due to the color difference, it really sticks out.
To be fair, I knew the zipper was a bit screwy when I put it in. Through a lack of specification in the pattern instructions, I didn’t sew the zipper in with a big enough seam allowance next to the zipper. If I had, it would have given some overlap of the top and bottom fly so that the zipper would sit farther inside the fly and not so close to the outside so it could peek out. I should have taken it all apart then and started over, but I tried to do some damage control and got it looking better, so I just went with it. Unfortunately, I knew that any pulling would show the zipper tape, I just didn’t know it would show so much!
In total sewing hours, neither the zipper or waistband really took me that long, but since I have such limited time to sew each day, it took 4 days worth of short bursts of work to do each piece. When I realized there were problems with each, I was so reluctant to rip out my stitches and start over while thinking of how many “days” worth of work I lost. It’s silly, but a difficult hurdle for me to get over. Do you ever feel like this? I made the right decision to redo the waistband and in the end, I wish I made the same decision with the zipper. Yet another lesson learned.
The other problem is the fabric. I used some stretch denim from my stash that I bought a few years ago for a costume where the stretch wasn’t really a factor. At this point I don’t know what the percentage of spandex was in the blend, but I’m thinking it has to be on the higher side (maybe 3% or 4%?) because this stuff really stretches. I mentioned it likely creating problems with the fit while sewing, but it also stretches out while wearing it and looks quite unflattering after a while! In the morning they looked pretty good, zipper aside, but by mid-afternoon I had a saggy butt and baggy knees. Yuck!
Due to both issues, but mostly the unflattering stretchiness of the denim, I don’t think I’ll probably wear them very much. Still, they were good for learning and I think these pants would work pretty well with a different fabric, so I do plan to tackle them again.
A little info about the pattern: I used the pants pattern in Wendy Mullin’s book SEW U. Her instructions are good for most of it, though I found a few places where additional information would have been helpful. Also, like many other reviews I’ve read of this book indicate, you need to go hunting for some of the instructions. It’s all there in the book, but it might be 3 or 4 chapters back that she mentions that you use a ½” seam allowance, for example.
For my version, I added a little length to the pattern since I’m tall and took the pattern in at the knees and lower thighs a bit to give it a more fitted look. I made a test muslin that looked pretty good and went together easily. When sewing in actual denim, I ran into a few snags. The aforementioned zipper was one and to anyone considering this pattern, I recommend reading this tutorial to provide some clarification to Wendy’s basic instructions. Amy’s tutorial has pictures that help out a lot.
Finally, the waistband was a pain in the butt! I don’t normally have issues with waistbands and I didn’t with the muslin, but this one just gave me no end of trouble! The waistband is split into three parts: back, right and left. The back of the waistband was too long for the back of the pants, so when I tried to ease the excess fabric, it resulted in ripples and undesired mini-pleats that looked horrible. When I ripped the seam out and decided to just align the center back of both waistband and pants and not worry that the side seams on the waistband didn’t match up with those on the pants (shudder), I still had problems with wrinkling during the topstitching. I’m still not sure why and again, wonder if this is an issue with the stretch denim. When I redid the waistband for the third time, after taking the jeans in at the sides, I cut out a new waistband all in one piece and that helped a lot, though I did still have a tiny bit of wrinkling to deal with. Any ideas or suggestions on this one??
Next, I’m going to stitch up a pair of shorts in a nice, woven twill. While I do, I’ll be imagining warm, sunny days of summer and ignoring the rain outside my window!
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