Happy Holidays everyone who celebrates! Hope you’re finding time to enjoy sewing amongst the festivities.
Sorry for the radio silence. What a crazy year it has been for us American-Brits! Double whammy controversies. If only sewing can ferry me away somewhere peaceful. Sadly sewing has been a battle ground too.
First was my failed attempt at an open back Choli Blouse Block with sleeves one can dance in. Parked, now that the frost has set in. Still simmering is another attempt at Pants/Trousers Block. This time, inspired by other ambitious cling-film wrappers like Kate of Fabrikated & the ladies of the London Dressmakers Meetup Group, I also attempted to make my Block from leg wraps rather than drafting from measurements or fiddling with countless muslins of commercial patterns.
Well, 2 wraps, 3 attempts at converting to patterns, 5 muslins, & countless tweaks later, this is the best I could manage…
A walk in the park it sure ain’t. So before I go into the details about the process in a separate post, let’s just chat about whether it’s worth the effort or not. It’s definitely less satisfying than making bodice + skirt block with the same method.
Lack of references & guidance
I haven’t found any online evidence of this technique perfected for making Pants/Trousers Block. Apart from Fabrikated’s attempt, the only other mention I can find is this old So-So Sewist blog post. Sadly it only showed her process & not the result, so I don’t know how successful her attempt was. Other people have mentioned the idea in passing, but none that I can find have actually documented their experiments & confirmed that this is a method that works well.
Pants pattern conventions
- Most pants are NOT skin tight. So trying to convert a skin-tight wrap into a looser fitting pants is difficult. You wrap in more surface areas (lengths & widths) than your pants needs – eg the length of the back princess line would be longer if you follow your bum & leg curve than if you drop straight down from the hip line.
If you don’t account for this difference & figure out a way to make your pants hug your curves (eg by making it skin-tight), then you’ll end up with pools of fabrics like I did with my wrap 1 muslin 1.
So unless you’re aiming for a skin-tight pants (eg for stretch woven or tight jeans), then this method might not give you the result you want. It may be possible to convert the skin-tight block into looser fitting blocks, but I have yet to figure out how to do that. If you don’t think you’ll ever want a skin-tight pants, then this technique may not be the most efficient way to achieve your goal. As for knit pants like legging, I think patterns for those are a different kettle of fish. Those unstable knits are meant to stretch to fit, so the patterns won’t have all the complicated curves that your wrap has. The wrap will give you more details than you’ll know what to do with! Again, it’s probably possible, but again, it seems like a lot more work than it’s worth. - Less seam & dart fitting options. Unlike the bodice (& even skirts), conventionally there’s a lot less seams, darts, & stylelines that can be used to give you a smoother fit over complicated curves. Eg, most pants don’t have princess seams. But look what a difference back princess seams make to the same warp 1 muslin 1 that you see above with pools of fabrics at the back thigh:
There were a lot more places where non-conventional seaming & darting might have given me a second skin look! Just look at how weird my wrap 1 is when flattened:
But I wasn’t brave enough to do down that route! :@) Without these options, I just had to accept wrinkles here & there, as you can see in my final best-I-can-manage muslin above.
Lack of references & guidance 2
This one is related to the fact that the wrap is firstly/mainly good for skin-tight pants. And the fact that…
It’s easy to make mistakes that magnifies. Tiny shift in the angle of a line – eg the inseam – could magnify over the length of the legs, making your pants legs too far off to the sides or centres at the ankles & causing wrinkles at the crotch as well as along the legs. I’ll show you my trials & errors in the next post, but even learning from my experience, this sort of mistakes may be unavoidable. Which leads us to…
Lack of fitting alteration guidance for skin-tight pants! None of my fitting books helped because they’re all aiming for looser fitting pants, and usually ones that hide your curves – even your booty. It’s a different ideal of pants fit. If I tried those same techniques on my skin-tight pants, they would cause other fitting problems – like that dreaded pool of fabric on the back thigh, because the alterations would make the legs looser & therefore the back too long.
The Holy Grail of the ‘Correct Crotch Curve’
You’d think that the wrap would at least help you find the correct crotch curve for your body right? Nope. My skin-tight muslin’s crotch curve ended up looking nothing like the crotch curve I got using a curvy ruler.
I’m beginning to think that pants fit is not just about the right crotch curve; that other things like the angle of your legs & prominence of thighs, or even how you stand also affect the fit including the fit of the crotch area. I’m also speculating that the bendy ruler crotch curve trick as explained in Fitting & Pattern Alterations book is really meant for looser fitting pants that hang fairly straight from your hip line down, and not ones that follow your booty & other curves. Maybe when I turn my skin-tight pants block into looser fitting pants block then this trick will come in handy. But I’m not holding my breath! Especially as there’s no before & after photos showing that this trick really works on real bodies.
In conclusion…
I think leg wrap as a way to create your personalized pants block is only worthwhile if you’re aiming for an initially skin-tight fit & none of the other methods (eg altering commercial patterns or drafting from measurements) worked for you. Patience will be mandatory. Definitely not a walk in the park!
Next time, learnings from my leg wrap Pants/Trousers Block experiments.
