Sewing with Patterns:: Pants

Are you like me?  Do you have a stash of sewing patterns?  Are these sewing projects calling your name?

In my New Year’s Re-SEW-lutions I declared that I would learn how to sew pants along with continuing to teach you how to sew.  Time to get on that.

For my first pants project I will be using Vogue Pattern V2948.  The pattern is part of the Pants Fitting/Pants Construction Craftsy Classes (See the button below on the right FMI.)  I do not think the pattern is available in the Vogue Pattern Catalog ~ you would  have to sign up for the Craftsy class in order to get this particular pattern.

Before diving into this project, I checked out a few sewing blogs to see if anyone had an opinion.  Pattern Review had several good reviews on the pattern and it was made up by women of varying sizes ~ with lots of positive reviews.  Perfect ~ now I’m ready to dive in.

OK, I’ve chosen a pattern which also has a fitting class.  I’m feeling positive ~ I can do this.  This cannot be that hard.

For this step I like to have a cup of coffee.  It’s more relaxing that way.  I opened the pattern, pulled out the pattern pieces, and read through ALL of the directions.

Next {and I consider this very important} I pressed the wrinkly pattern with a DRY iron.  No steam, please.  Just hot, dry heat.  Think about it, if you have a wrinkled pattern, how are you ever going to get a good fit?  If you use steam, you will have wet tissue paper ~ I’m just saying….dry heat.

See the difference.  It is so much easier to work with a nice, smooth pattern.

The next step I’m not going to show you because it involves me in my underwear; it’s choosing the correct size.  Fortunately, this pattern is sized for real women and comes in a ton of sizes.  Take true measurements {the video series shows how to do this} and then match them to your size on the pattern.  I went with my waist measurement {which I refuse to share) and will adjust accordingly.

You would think that the next step is trimming the pattern in my exact size ~ Wrong-O.  Instead, I like to rough trim around my pattern pieces and leave all the sizes on the tissue paper.  I adjusted the length in both the crotch and leg and then outlined my size with a colored pencil.

That’s as far as I got and I’m happy with it for now.  If you look closely at the pattern picture above, you will notice that the pants have  a princess seam down the front {and the back, too}.  That means I made all of these adjustments to four pattern pieces (two for the front, two for the back).   The seam is going supposed to make size adjustment a lot easier.

The next step will be to make a muslin out of this pattern.  I am still not going to cut out the tissue pattern.  Instead, I’m going to trace my pattern pieces onto muslin.  I will be back with an update as soon as I tackle this.  But first, I have to get my Flu Shots Tonic ready for y’all.  The new moon is almost here.