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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