Sunday, January 22, 2017

E's New Pants


A couple of years ago, E emerged from surgery with a medical device which sits almost exactly at his natural waist, sticks out about an inch, and needs to be protected from scrapes and bumps. If it were located a little bit lower or a little bit higher, he could wear all of the pants he wore before the surgery. But, it isn’t and he can’t, so we began looking for pants with a rise high enough to cover the device. (The rise is the distance from the middle of the crotch to the top of the waist band.) Unfortunately, the commercially available pants we found weren’t nearly high rise enough. Nothing to do but make a pair, right?

A few years ago, a blog I like (MalePatternBoldness) had a jeans sew-along using Kwik Sew pattern 3504 and I remembered it seemed fairly easy to follow. The pattern contains several sizes and I copied the one closest to E’s size onto pieces of tracing paper and used the tracing paper pattern to make a pair of trial pants from an old flat sheet. The photo above shows this pair as a work in progress.

The trial pair needed a lot of adjustments, mostly because I was adding so many inches to the rise. When you lengthen the rise as much as I did, the waist no longer sits anywhere near where the pattern intends it to sit and this affects the size of the waist, the size and placement of the front and rear pockets, the taper from the hips to the waist, etc. I incorporated the adjustments into the tracing paper pattern and made a second trial pair of pants. The second pair needed some adjustments, too, so I made more revisions to the tracing paper pattern. The next pair of trial pants fit reasonably well and I used the revised, re-drawn, amended, adjusted, much abused tracing paper pattern to make a pair of pants from a medium-weight cotton twill. (I also re-drew the adjusted pattern onto a clean sheet of tracing paper, to make my life a little easier the next time I use the pattern.)


Here’s a view of the front at the waist. 


The pockets are a snazzy snake skin patterned fabric. 


The yoke in the back came in handy because it allowed me to fine tune 
the fit in the back around the waist and hips. 


And here’s how they look with E inside. (They really don’t pull at the crotch. Honest! I didn’t notice they looked like this when I took the photo and I don’t want to wait for E to get home so I can take another photo. Trust me: They look fine.) 

By and large, I’m happy with these and so is E. I would recommend KS 3504 regardless of how much sewing experience you have. The pattern instructions were easy to follow and the jeans sew-along on the MalePatternBoldness blog has lots of good photos which show how to use this pattern, too.


Happy sewing everyone!

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