analog me

Jalie 2908 Redux

My fashion model pose (Inspired by Ms. Badger) 

I naively thought that I would correct all my fitting issues with this second pair of jeans and have a blueprint for all future ones. Alas, anytime you change anything on pants for the better, it seems to be balanced by creating new problem everywhere else. For example: 

• I reduced the inner thigh width, which shortened the crotch length.
• I increased back length which gives my behind more room while sitting and bending, but might contribute to increased wrinkles on my back thigh while standing straight.
• I curved out the side hip which seems to make the side length a bit longer and created some wrinkles.
• I tried scooping out the back crotch curve to be more ergonomic which reduced width on the seat back.

Whatever! I made them and they fit better than most of my pants. 

In case you were wondering about my cowgirl boots, these were my mom's in the mid 60's, and she was wearing them when she saved my life. You see, I had enraged a mother cow and my mom ran in front of her so I could skuttle under a gate to safety. The mother cow then knocked down and trampled my mother breaking a couple of her vertebrae while I cowered just outside the corral. All I remember of this drama is crawling under the gate and lying in the grass on the safe side of the fence, and then complaining because she wouldn't carry me. Thanks Mom! I owe you!

Back to sewing. My biggest problems were materials shortages. I barely had enough fabric (so the length is skimpy) and I ran out of top-stitching thread. I thought of my thread hoarding post, because I had to rip out the inner thigh top stitching, salvage it, and rewind it on the thread spool just to have enough to go around the waistband. I guess you can never take thread for granted.

I cut the waistband in halves on the lengthwise grain with a wedge taken out of the top and a separate inner and outer piece. Sewn together it makes a subtle V and serves as a small center back dart. This seems to be the next best thing to a curved waistband.

I'm tempted to make one more pair, but I am out of denim and it's time to move on. Anyway, I'm sure to change sizes at least once sometime in the next year and then the fitting process can start all over again!

Details:

• Fabric: denim from stash, seems to have no stretch, cost 5.00 from Mill Ends?, pocket lining: batik percale from stash, inner waistband: Very stable navy blue fabric from Jessica. (Thanks Jessica!)
• Thread: blue poly and Guttermann Top-stitching color 548
• Needles: jeans for sewing and a leather needle for the top stitching
• Pattern: Jalie 2908
• Cowboy boots: Mom's closet

FBA (full butt alteration) for jeans

In my last post I promised to give some hints to prevent gaping at the back waist of the Jalie 2908 jeans. But the same principles could  even be used for skirts or other pants with a back yoke. Then I decided I needed to test out my alterations, thus the wait.

I'm giving a lot of information so you understand why you should add here and subtract there. You will have more of the facts you need to boss your pattern around, covering your ass without baring your back waist!

First off, some geometry

The reason a lot of of have this problem is that the derriere needs a lot more fabric to encircle it than the waist does, especially at center back. If not enough fabric is removed at waist back, then then the fabric goes up in a cylinder shape (instead of a cone) and sticks out from our body.

The bigger the difference between the oval that represents your waist measurement, and that of your high hip, the more challenging it becomes to provide enough fabric to cover your butt and remove it to hug your waist. Here is a really odd (but enlightening) perspective of the body that I copied from the Fashion Incubator blog that illustrates the back side of the body as several horizontal slices.

The waist is one of the smaller half ovals, and the high hip is the solid line. You can really see how much the body slopes in here.

Remember too, that it takes more length to travel out and around the behind and back in—especially when you are sitting down.

 Dart Manipulation for jeans

In most pants the extra fabric in the back waist is removed with two vertical darts. 

Here is a little model to illustrate where the darts typically are, with the future jeans yoke drawn over them. The larger the darts are at the top the more fabric is removed from the waist and released over the fullest part of your rear.

 

 

 

 

To make the jeans yoke, that top section is cut off making two back pieces: the pants back and the yoke.  When the yoke darts are closed, the fabric that would have been in darts is moved to a negative space at the side between the bottom of the yoke and the top of the pants back. (Shown between the yellow lines.) 

So the larger the original darts, the more fabric will be subtracted between the yellow lines, and the more the red line will curve up and in to accommodate a smaller waist circumference.

By closing of the remainder of the darts in the pants back, the center back is raised up and a wedge of fabric added the the center back right where we need a little extra length to travel out over the rump and back in at the lower back. Then the the center back seam is redrawn, scooping out the center back crotch seam a bit to make room for the gluteus maximus. This puts that center back seam more on the bias which gives the center back a bit more wiggle room thus avoiding the dreaded mono-butt look. At the same time it will subtract the amount of fabric covering the rear, so an equal amount should be added to the side. 

Altering for your rounded rump

Usually we choose a pattern based on hip size. If we have a curvier rear, then the waist is typically too big.

To alter your yoke for a smaller waist, make a vertical cut (about a third of the way from the center back) from top to bottom leaving a hinge at the bottom. In the photo above it looks like a thin black line between the two closed darts. Overlap and tape. Below I traced what my Jalie 2908 yoke looked like before (line with Xs) and after I altered it with the pants back drawn underneath it. You can see how much larger that side dart became, and how much more the top line curves up. I also took a tiny wedge out out of the center top.

Now its helpful to add a tiny dart to the top of the jeans back. The easiest way to do this is to just cut a rectangle from the center top back leaving a hinge right above the fullest part of your tush, as seen below. 

Rotate the rectangle so that it overlaps at the top and opens a wedge at center back.

Now fill in the wedge and smooth out that center back curve as shown in the black line. You could even take more out at the top center than I have shown here.

To figure out how much to take out, I checked my butt curve with the flexible ruler (below) and came up with this. I didn't remove quite that much, but I did take out about 1/4". I had already added a bit more than this to the side edge for my wide hips, so there was enough fabric in width to keep me covered. I suggest cutting the front and back sides a size or two larger than you need at first and taking them in as needed while figuring out all the alterations to the behind.

After all these alterations, my jeans fit my butt much better, but I needed to add some shaping to the center back of the waistband to make it fit the pants and my body. (Photo coming soon!)

It's very tempting to keep tweaking the pattern endlessly, but jeans already fit so much better than most jeans that I am very happy. 

Hope this didn't bore you to death.

Does this make any sense at all? Any other fitting ideas?

Don't Hate Alley—make your jeans fit your hips

Well, I seem not to have evoked too much wrath or envy in my new fancy pants. There were a few fit questions. How about we start with hips?

If you look closely, my jeans do make what I have learned are called "whiskers." Yes, that's what those lovely little wrinkles that point at the crotch of us full-hipped women are called. And my extensive archival research (i.e. I saw this book in with hubby's stuff) shows that while this term is recent, the phenomenon reaches back to the early history of dames wearing jeans.

Yes, even female juvenile delinquents in the 1950's were prone to "whiskers." (BTW, isn't this outfit rather, err, sweet, for a delinquent?) 

Comprehensive research (i.e. I read somewhere that horizontal wrinkles point to areas without enough width) determined the cause: my pants are a bit too tight at that particular latitude.

Okay, I knew I could make the pants bigger there, but I didn't quite know how to add some width in exactly the right contour. Also, I was feeling lazy and, to be honest, those books on making pants fit make me feel tired. I thought, what would a person with a tool belt do to figure out how to match a complex curve?  Take a ton of measurements and fiddle around with a pattern? Oh no, s/he would grab a contour duplication gauge and just copy it. Of course that might not work so well on my larger, squishier curves. Then I had a great idea, maybe a flexible ruler would do the trick.

I pressed my flexible ruler on my hips, laid it on the pattern, saw the problem, and took a crappy photo. No measuring, slashing spreading or french curves needed; it was almost disappointingly easy.

And, the flexible ruler is the gift that keeps giving because it provided the solution too. I just added some tracing paper there and redrew the curve. Guess what? Anyone can do this in the privacy of their own home! 

It seems too easy so I when I make these up, I am going to baste that seam and then adjust the fit. Because we are in the hypothesis testing phase here, and need extensive experimentation. 

Reader's what do you think, will you help me test my technique?

P.S. Stayed tuned for the next installment: adjust for a gaping back waist.

My New Jeans (Jalie 2908) and, oh yes, I sinned

It's time for a confession. 

For a while now I have been consumed by jeans envy. I read sewing blogs where talented women of the cloth show off their new Jalie jeans and am consumed by covetness. I have envied their perfectly fitting jeans, envied their sewing skills, envied their elongated legs and envied their top-stitching. Did those bloggers feel guilty for sowing discontent in the heart of a sewing sister? No, They were so happy in their new pants, that they didn't even care about the wrath they left in their butt-enhanced wake. 

Last spring while I was researching cowls, I tried on a pair of 175.00 jeans. During the 5 minutes that I vainly admired my long, expensive looking legs in the dressing room mirror I committed a year's worth of pride. Then I took them off, wrestled with my jeans greed, and left them behind.

If I wasn't so slothful, I would have made a pair right then. Yes, I had already greedily bought the pattern, and some fabric too, if you must know. (Are you starting to wonder how I am going to weave lust and gluttony in here? Me too.)

Anyway, you guessed! I finally made those jeans. I think that finishing that quilt binding opened me up to starting a difficult new, project. Readers, I didn't tell you all I was trying to make jeans because I was convinced that I would be repaid for my former sins by a karmic fail of epic proportions, and I (pridefully) did not want to have to post a picture of my denim in the trash. 

So I worked away on the seams, fly, and endless top-stitching while repeatably holding the little bits of denim up to my rump and repeating, "this is never going to fit." I stayed up late to see how the mystery would be solved. Would the fabric cover my hind end? Guess what? It did! Quite nicely too, if I may pridefully assert.

 

(Don't you just love how normally shy women will publically post photos of their butt in sewing blogs?)

My husband (you know, the cowboy) admired them, I even think I saw a glimmer of lust in his eyes. Or maybe that was just my imagination, because what he said was: "There's not room for you to gain one pound in those." 

Lucky for me, now gluttony is now out of the question.