An update, and the on-going trouser fitting saga

I have been absent from this blog for a while, but I am back, and here to talk about my early summer sewing plans and my continued Troubles With Trousers.

First, a brief recap of what I have done, sewing-wise, since I was last here on 1 January, talking about my exciting plans for the year:




*crickets chirp*




Well, it's not quite a void. I finished one gigantic purple scarf I have been knitting on and off for a couple of years (see below), and I made 1 (one) sewn item: a pair of PJ shorts with a remnant left over from another project and a TNT pattern. This latter took me all of an hour and is so uninteresting even to me that I refuse to consider taking a photo of it. That's really not much for a 4 month period, given that most years I average about 1 completed item per week!

Giant seed stitch wrap in two shades of purple (Purl Soho Worst Twist Seed Stitch Wrap)

Why have I accomplished so little? Partly it's down to the usual reason (ill health). Partly though, I just didn't really need or want any more winter or early spring clothes.  Since this coincided with a total lack of enthusiasm for sewing, I just... didn't sew. I did read 130 books in the same time period (I will typically read about 40 in a four month period) so you can understand where my extra time went.

However, as we come into late spring/summer, I have mustered quite a lot of enthusiasm for getting started sewing again. I have definite gaps in my wardrobe for the coming season, and we have already had some good weather for which I was not entirely well-prepared. (Of course, the Easter weekend having been 25C and sunny, it is now much more April-in-northern-England typical, which is to say: heaving rain, 8C. But the good weather will come back eventually. I hope.)

Trouser plans for spring/summer 2019. Why yes, I am reaching FAR back in my magazine stash to the mid 00s.

My immediate plans include making trousers. Now, if you have been reading a while, you may recall that my previous experiences of trouser making are (a) moderately successful when confined to simple knit trousers and PJs, and (b) otherwise, when it comes to woven trousers, pretty terrible. (See here and here for examples of how well my previous efforts at woven trouser making didn't go.)

However, I am determined to conquer trousers this year!

My mantra for trouser making in 2019 is: good enough is definitely good enough. Yes, there are people who achieve the perfect, wrinkle free trouser fit, but while I can admire their work, I can't start with the expectation of emulating it. When it comes to tops, last year I felt like I made a lot of small, incremental fitting improvements over the year. It didn't always work, but lots of little changes added up to some quite significant improvements in fit. This year I am going to try to do the same with trousers (and skirts, if I should happen to make any), as well as continuing to hone my upper body fitting. One thing that is certain is that I won't get any better at making trousers if I pursue my current path of never making trousers. However, I am prepared for the reality that the first few pairs will not turn out brilliantly. Previously I tended to feel completely paralyzed when things went wrong with trouser fitting, and I am determined not to do that this time.

The Bluprint (Craftsy) class I used to make a pants sloper

Although I haven't been sewing,  I didn't entirely stop thinking about sewing, and one of the things I have been chewing over mentally is how to get started making trousers that fit. Previously, I attempted to use a basic commercial pattern and modify it to fit. I have no doubt this can be a very successful approach for many people, but I didn't seem to learn much from it myself. I decided that my problem was that I didn't really understand how trouser patterns were put together, nor how they are meant to fit. As a result, I spent a lot of time reading my fitting books (I have many), looking at how my existing (mainly RTW) trousers fit me, and looking at how other people resolved fitting problems. In the end, I decided that the way forward was to try drafting my own pattern, as a way to become really familiar with how body measurements and pants patterns match up.

I have to admit that for the most part I have less than zero interest in designing or drafting patterns, so this is a departure for me. To get started, I therefore looked at a couple of options in books, but the texts I found seemed rather inaccessible in writing style, were very expensive, and contained a huge amount of information  about adapting the basic block into various other forms, which does not interest me. However, I also remembered that I previously watched a Craftsy class about drafting skirts led by Suzy Furrer, and enjoyed it. I was very happy to see she had done a trouser drafting class as well. The majority of the class is about the pattern drafting, and she only really briefly considers variations at the end. I highly recommend this class whether you want to draft your own patterns, or if, like me, you just feel like it would help you understand how trouser patterns work. I thought that it was very clear, accessible, and well-presented, and well worth the time and effort.

It's worth knowing what you will get out of the class, and here's a spoiler: it absolutely will not result in a perfectly fitting pair of trousers from the first muslin. Here is my personal muslin #1, in natty blue gingham:

Back view of muslin 1

I never seem to have any major issues with the fit at the front of my trousers, but the back is a different story.  This isn't the worst fit I've ever seen, but it's not good. I've been at this point before, several times, and I can't say that in the past I've ever managed to really improve anything much from this point.

 However, at this point all my reading about fit and my improved understanding of the assumptions that are made when trouser patterns are drafted actually paid off. I did a second muslin and tried to address some of the issues above the knee, and then third muslin where I looked at knee level and lower. This is how the third muslin looks side by side with the first (yes, sorry, my feet are a little bit further away from each other in the second photo, which makes the second photo artificially better, but it's still a reasonable comparison):

Muslin 1 (left) vs, Muslin 3 (right)

I've really learned a LOT from doing these three muslins. Obviously muslin 3 is still not perfect, but I think I have an idea how to resolve the remaining problems. One issue is a product of my "upper leg then lower leg" approach. I did a small knock knee adjustment in muslin 3, but I put it in at knee level because I thought of it as a "lower leg/knee" problem. This is obviously stupid -- if the problem is with my knee, I need to address it ABOVE the knee, not AT the knee. I think when I move the adjustment up, those diagonal lines pointing at the knee will go away. It may also resolve some of the continued inner thigh draglines. I also still have some work to do on the crotch curve.

The most important thing I learned from drafting the pattern myself was that the distance from where I want the waist of trousers to sit to the same point at the back, via the crotch, is much shorter in vertical length and much longer in horizontal length than my self-drafted pattern (or commerical patterns) assumed. As a result, when I make the pattern actually fit me, it works out that the rise of my trousers is quite short, and the crotch points are ultra long. My actual personal pattern therefore looks a bit bonkers. When I made previous attempts at trouser fitting, and even in the initial stages of improving the fit of my self-drafted pattern, I really resisted making those changes to the pattern because I thought it couldn't possibly be right: the pattern just looks so strange in comparison to most commercial patterns. I assumed I must be doing something wrong if I was getting results that varied so wildly from the norm.

This is where the drafting class was super helpful to me, because I was able to put together the problems I was having with fit and the problems I had trying to make sense of the measuring process before I started drafting the pattern. That made it clear to me that the problem was not with my weirdly shaped final pattern, but with the difference between the assumptions about body shape baked into the way the pattern is drawn and the actual body I am trying to fit into the trousers.

For example, at the start of the process you identify where you want your trousers to sit -- at the navel, in my case, because I have a natural "crease" exactly at my navel -- and then you measure down so many inches for the high hip, low hip, crotch level, etc. The class notes suggest if you are tall or petite you may need to adjust this. Well, I am 173cm tall (about 5'8") so I went into it thinking I might need to make a "tall" adjustment. Except as soon as I started measuring, it because clear to me that this was not AT ALL the case. The distance she suggested for an "average" person from waist to low hip was below my crotch line. I ended up taking the measurements as if I were petite. Then my low hip, supposedly the largest measurement, turned out to be smaller than my high hip.

This all explains SO MUCH about my previous experiences with both patterns and RTW, and just this insight alone made it worth my time to do the drafting class. So many pairs of trousers I've owned, and most of those I've made, have ended up either (a) with me having the pull the waistband up to my ribcage in order for it to be seated properly, and/or (b) the waistband rolls over constantly at the waist every time I bend or move and/or, probably worst and most common, (c) the waistband drops to my natural waist and I end up with a saggy butt and my back pockets half way down my thighs.

With all this in mind, I find I am way more comfortable creating a pattern block that looks really quite different from the way I expected it to when I started, if in doing so I eradicate all of those problems. It seems almost miraculous to contemplate: imagine if trousers didn't fit that badly all the time!

My next steps are as follows:

1. Muslin 4: Fix the knock knee problem, work on the crotch curve a little more, and make what is hopefully my final muslin to test it.
2. Transfer the "finished for now" pattern onto something more durable than tissue paper.
3. Make trousers!!

The end of the pattern drafting class moves on to making variations on the basic block for various different types of trousers. I am not at all interested in doing that. What I would like to  be able to do is take my self-drafted basic block, slap it on to a commercial pattern and see what changes I need to make.

I have had a go at this already, with mixed results. Good news: simple patterns in Ottobre and Burda seemed to be a pretty good match from the outset. I'll have to change the crotch curve and the height of the rise is going to be a consistent issue with every company I've checked so far. Overall, though, I think I'd probably be able come up with a common set of adjustments that I'd need with their patterns. It helps that I already know how consistent those two companies are. For the most part my experience with Ottobre and Burda is that you can make yourself a little "routine adjustments" list, and just work through it with any new pattern.

I also compared my block as it stands to a couple of very simple New Look patterns that came in wardrobe patterns (you know the kind: two tops, a jacket, and then a very boring skirt and a very boring pair of trousers as filler) and it was a surprisingly close match. I find New Look patterns a bit blah but it's useful to know.

Of the bad: I have a couple of those Simplicity Amazing Fit trouser patterns and they are just not at all Amazing for me. Whereas it's really obvious to me what size(s) I should use with the other companies, the difference between the Simplicity pattern and my block are so extreme that I can't even work out where to start, size-wise, and the level of changes I would have to make would really mess with things like pocket placement. Probably easier to just not use those patterns, I think!

I haven't had a chance to look at other pattern companies yet, but honestly, if I only had Ottobre and Burda patterns available to me, I'd have patterns enough for the rest of my life.

Barring disaster, I'll hopefully be back again in a much shorter space of time to share successful trousers with you :D