Pants

There was a box full of free stuff last night (I love free, it is my favorite price) and in it was a pair of amazing pajama pants. Unfortunately, the pajama pants are for a size 56 waist and I happen to wear a 34. The cloth was so fantastic that I decided that I would try my hand at remaking them to fit me. The cloth is silky on the outside and like flannel cotton on the inside with a pattern of red and dark red stripes going vertically. Since the stripes on the outside are perfectly aligned, I decided that changing the inside seam was the way to go, which also allows me to raise the crotch height from half way to my knees to my actual crotch.

I started by culling along the seam from the front to the back and along the inseam. Next I started pinning it around me to get a custom fit. That was when I realized that putting in pins where I can't see is quite difficult. After a few moments of thought, I decided to make a body double. This was done by covering my bare skin in saran wrap and then covering the saran wrap in clear packing tape. Doing this on your own is quite difficult, but luckily my boyfriend was there ... to watch and laugh without helping at all. Oh well. Once I had the double cast from my belly button to my knees, I drew a line down my sides where I thought the pants seam should approximately go and my underwear line so that the pants wouldn't be too low. Then I cut off the double and taped it back together (my guidelines were quite helpful in lining everything back up).

I started pinning the cloth to the dummy and getting the fit just right. After pinning everything to the dummy, I realized that I needed to take everything off of the dummy to sew it and proceeded to use the already placed pins as a guide to placing pins that only joined cloth to cloth. Once the piece was free of the dummy, I took it off and made adjustments and put it back on and made more adjustments. Now I have the whole thing almost all pinned together, except that I'm not sure what to do about the legs as the original pants had a taper and the way they are progressing will have the inseam curving around to my shins. I have also done a bit of research on how pants are constructed by examining other pants, and have come to the conclusion that I should do the crotch seams first and the inseams after. For the closure, I have decided to have the front lace up with a flap behind the lacing that buttons on the inside. I'm hoping to start sewing tomorrow.