Autumn/Winter wardrobe additions

This year, I decided I needed that I needed 9 new items to round out my everyday/casual wardrobe for the rest of 2019.

My 9 items were:

1 cardigan

2 pairs of mid-weight trousers
2 pairs of leggings

2 longer-length woven tops
2 knit tunic/short dresses

I ended up buying the leggings rather than making them. I have a favourite, inexpensive RTW brand of leggings though that I find fit me the way I prefer and I don't think there's any benefit to making them vs. buying them in terms of fabric, cost, or fit.

That left seven items to sew, and these are the patterns I picked:

My autumn/winter sewing patterns

Trousers

I made the Burda and Jalie trousers from the same large piece of slightly brushed navy cotton stretch twill. I am going to be honest: I tried to take photos but it's a really dark navy and all you can see is like vague blobs, even with the exposure cranked up, so I will keep the photos to a minimum!

Let's start with something positive: I literally cannot express how much I love the Jalie Eleonore trousers. The fact that this is a great pattern is not news to anyone who was around when it came out, because the whole world and their sister made it and (mostly) liked it. I made the full length version, in plain navy, with the pocket add-on. I made very few fitting changes: mainly I straightened out the shaping along the inner thigh and did a knock knee adjustment.

They are not a perfect fit, but they fit probably the best closer fitting/stretch fabric trousers I've made so far, and the places they don't fit well (below the butt; above my calf muscles at the back in particular) are the same place every single pair of closer fitting trousers ever has wrinkled on me. I could probably have fewer wrinkles if I increased the width of the back leg from above the knee, but the wider leg changes the whole shape of the trousers so I haven't done so.

My one complaint about the Jalie Eleonore is actually about the pocket add-on. It's true, the add-on pattern piece does create a pocket. Alas, it makes one of those sad, vestigial, fingertip-deep pockets that are almost more annoying than no pocket at all. I will definitely adjust this when I make the pattern again.

The other trousers turned out MUCH less well and in some ways I am kicking myself for not just making a second pair of Eleonore trousers! The pattern I used, Burda 01-2007-108 is a simple straight leg pattern with a top entry pocket. I made this pattern before with only moderate success, but I hoped that using the trouser block pattern I drafted for myself earlier this year would help refine the fit. Alas, no.

Having traced out the pattern, I slapped on the trouser block and adjusted the pattern to match to the best of my ability. It turns out my best ability was not very good. I made some changes to the last version of my block on the crotch curve shape and got it wrong, and in the process of fixing that problem by sewing a new curve in the part-finished trousers I was making, I lengthened the crotch curve again. Since the main problem I have with Burda trouser patterns is that the crotch length is far too long for me, I actually resolved nothing. The trousers are also overall too big at the waist and leg, and slightly too short because I made a mistake with my hem calculation. It's a litany of disappointment, in short.

So far I've worn these trousers about a half a dozen times, but I can already feel myself defaulting to almost anything else that's clean in preference to wearing them. I'll see if I get a bit more wear out of them, but if not, eh, failed experiment, move on. 

Fly  of Burda 01-2007-108 trousers. Please forgive how wrinkly these look, I dragged them out of the ironing basket for a photo!

 All that said, I did do a few things really well: this is the "sewing course" pattern in this issue of Burda and, as unlikely as this sounds, the fly instructions are fantastic and the fly and waistband overall turned out really well. I must remember to photocopy the fly instructions for all future trouser-making activities.

Cardigan

Ottobre 05-2019-10 cardigan in blue ponte

This is a really quick and easy pattern from the latest Ottobre magazine. I had a problem with the front band, which was far too short when I cut it out. I didn't have enough fabric left to recut the whole thing, so I pieced in an extra section. Luckily, the uneven stripe and texture of this  fabric totally hides this "fix". At first I thought there was a problem with the pattern that caused this not to work. However, I have since seen at another review of the pattern and they didn't mention a problem so probably it was my fault somehow!

I like this cardigan (and strangely my mum really loves it) but I find it a bit shapeless and square, and I don't particularly like the way the collar sits at the  back neck. For sure I don't like it as much as my favourite cardigan pattern I've used a dozen times, the StyleArc Estelle.

Woven Tops

These are both tunic length tops, falling to about mid-thigh.

Butterick 5203 in navy patterned viscose

I have made up Butterick 5203 before, so making this version was simple. The pattern calls for a keyhole opening at the back and therefore a centre back seam. However, the neckline sans keyhole is more than large enough to slip over my head AND I have an irrational dislike of keyhole necklines (not even so much making them: I hate wearing them!) AND I hate chopping up large prints unnecessarily, so I just cut the back on the fold and omitted the keyhole. I love this top -- ultra simple to make, and it's just really pretty. I made it in  a lightweight viscose woven, which is an ideal fabric for this drapey, flowing top pattern.

Simplicity 2246 (view B) in navy and white gingham

The very first garment pattern I ever acquired was Simplicity 2246, a Lisette shirtdress pattern. I think everyone and their mother made it the year it came out (2012). My copy came on the front of a magazine, and I've hung on to it ever since as something I'd like to make. I'm not entirely happy with my version, but it's all right.

On the plus side: This shirt/tunic has a separate (rather than foldover) button band, and I am very pleased with my decision to put the bands on my version on the bias. I also bias cut the collar. My reasoning was about 80% practicality and 20% aesthetics. Mainly, I did NOT want to pattern match the gingham across all those pieces! However, the other problem was that the width of the finished button band was really awkward when compared to the width of the gingham squares, and I didn't like any of the alternatives I came up with for how to cut it (along a white stripe, along a navy stripe, half-and-half). Cutting it on the bias got rid of that problem entirely and also I think it's aesthetically pleasing to have the obvious vertical feature running down the front of the top.

Close-up of gingham shirt.

Minus side: The fit. As much as I like this shirt, it just doesn't fit as well as I would like. I needed a touch more ease over the waist and hip. It's not that it doesn't fit, exactly -- everything buttons up fine, nothing pulls -- but it's just a little bit closer fitting than I wanted for the outfits I had in my head. Still, it's fine, and since I am currently at the top of my normal weight range, there's a strong possibility it will fit more like I prefer as I fluctuate downwards again.

Knit tunics/short dresses

I like to wear leggings & longer tops on days when I am planning to spend all day at home. I therefore like to make soft, cosy knit tunics or short dresses to wear with them, to make outfits that are basically just a half-a-step removed from pyjamas but that are, at the same time, perfectly respectable if I have to answer the door or run to the post box. I tend to change up my patterns a lot -- I don't think I've ever made the same pattern twice in this category of garment.

This time I made a Butterick See-and-Sew pattern with a cowl neck and a slightly curved hem (Butterick 5870) and a very simple A-line skirted t-shirt dress from a recent Ottobre (Ottobre 05-2017-18).

Butterick 5870 in navy polka dot viscose/lycra knit. The cowl looks super awkward on Flossie and much nicer on a person

I like both of these a LOT but I actually have nothing at all to say about the construction, really. The Butterick dress turned out a little smarter looking than I entirely intended -- I can definitely imagine someone more into dresses than me wearing this just with tights out and about --  but it's really cute and I like it a lot. I'm really tempted to make the other view (which is the same dress in every respect other than the neckline, with is a V with a small scarf feature) next time I make a knit top like this. It was super easy to put together, and it's a great pattern.

Ottobre 05-2017-18, A-line skirted t-shirt dress in blue cotton-lycra knit

The Ottobre pattern was even easier as it's literally just a t-shirt dress and has no distinguishing features. I swapped out the long sleeves in the pattern for 3/4 sleeves, and I actually redrew the whole shoulder and armhole and used my own established tshirt pattern sleeve rather than the pattern, because why bother reinventing the wheel. I also lowered the neckline to a slightly deeper scoop as, as designed, this was rather high. I have to be honest: my version bears more than a passing resemblance to a nightgown. I think this might be improved by making this pattern up in a print rather than a plain pattern, but I don't think any t-shirt dress is ever going to be the most sophisticated of looks.

Overall, even though there are little problems with some of the things I made and I am not equally enthusiastic about  all of them, I am quite pleased with my wardrobe additions for the season. Some I've already worn a LOT, some of them have been waiting until the weather cooled down in October and I've only just started wearing. The definite star of the show though is the Jalie Eleonore trousers, which I love to pieces.

Next up: a wool suit! This is my BIG project for the autumn, and I probably won't have time to work on anything else at all for a while. I'm going to post more about it maybe tomorrow or Monday, so more details on this soon. :D

Imperfect trousers are better than no trousers (Burda 01-2007-108A)

On my list of things to do this year was work on fitting trousers. I gave it a go back in February, but though I spent what felt like a huge amount of time and effort on it, it wasn't overly successful. After four muslins, I hadn't really improved the fit significantly from the first muslin, and I never moved on to making an actual pair of trousers because the whole fitting experience was so exhausting and all I had achieved was trousers with pretty indifferent fit.

This month, however, I really needed to acquire at least one new pair of trousers. I'll admit it: I fully intended to just buy some. However, when I had a day when I felt quite well, I went out shopping and after rifling through the stock in multiple shops, it seemed like nearly everything available was tapered or skinny leg, neither of which I am keen on. I only found two of pairs of straight leg trousers that seemed like possibilities. When I tried them on, though, one pair really didn't fit at all no matter what size I tried, and although the second pair fit more or less okay they were ridiculously expensive. I'd run out of both steam and local shops to investigate at that point so I went home to sulk about it.

At that point a little lightbulb went on for me: if my choice is between indifferently fitting expensive RTW trousers, and indifferently fitting sewn trousers, why not just sew? Of course it would be better if I were able to make well-fitting trousers. However, as long as the fit of these early attempts isn't WORSE than the store-bought alternative the overall outcome is probably neutral. Also, one thing for sure is that I'm not going to get any better at making trousers by not making them.

So that was my goal this week: make some trousers, no matter how imperfect, because imperfect trousers are better than not having trousers.

Imperfect trousers: complete! (Burda 01-2007-108A in navy twill)

After my experience starting from a Burda pattern in February, I decided to see what happened if I started this time with a customized sloper pattern from Bootstrap. Bootstrap uses the same underlying pattern-making system as Lekala, which I have used with some success this year as a way to short-circuit some fitting issues in top patterns. Lekala is cheaper (if you buy in the frequent $1 sales) so I hadn't really bothered with Bootstrap up to now. However, more recently Bootstrap has started to offer some extra "indie" patterns, including some pants slopers, that are not available from Lekala. These patterns allow you to customize some additional trouser fitting details such as thigh width and butt shape.

Bootstrap CustomFit Classic Pants Sloper With Facing

I bought the CustomFit Classic Pants Sloper With Facing (NOT an affiliate link), and made up a muslin. As I sewed I was sort of day-dreaming that I'd put them on and miraculously they'd look amazing and I'd only have to make some minor alterations to make them fit me perfectly.

Ha. Hahaha. Ha.

No.

I mean, obviously no. I was aware even while I thought about it that was not going to happen, but I admit I did hope for better initial fit than I got. I put them on and the fit was in fact pretty horrible, just like the first muslin I made previously from a similar Burda pattern. Depressingly, it was also horrible in more or less exactly the same ways: huge amounts of excess fabric pooling below the butt, huge diagonal lines radiating from my large upper thighs. I'd hoped that using my actual thigh measurements to produce the sloper would make a difference to the thigh problem, but this was not the case at all. This is because the extra width at the thigh is evenly distributed between the seams on the pattern, but not on my body (my inner thigh is where all the extra room is needed). I realize this is perfectly reasonable as generalized customization method, but it didn't help me. More concerning is that the waist fit was not only not better, it was significantly worse than the Burda pattern I tried previously -- I took out multiple centimetres to get it to fit. I triple checked and my measurements were both accurate and input correctly, so who knows what went wrong there.

My overall impression of the Bootstrap CustomFit sloper then is not very positive. Mostly it looked like the straight-off-the-pattern sheet Burda pattern, and none of the things it was meant to customize actually customized it in a useful way. It is entirely possible I picked the wrong customizations for e.g. butt shape, but at $7 for the pattern I can't afford to keep buying repeats to see if that makes a difference. That said, I definitely think for someone who has struggled to find ANY base pattern from which to start -- and in particular people who are sized out of Burda/Burda Plus or the Big4, since this can be customized up to a 56" hip -- this might be a way to get a basic sloper pattern. For me though, since I am actually a pretty average size and shape, it was kind of a waste of money.

At any rate, since I have some experience of fitting these problems from last time, I made some adjustments (one of them extremely technically dubious) to the Bootstrap pattern and after some effort I ended up with a basic pant sloper that I think more or less worked.

Key words: More or less. I am not going to pretend that I achieved anything like good fit! However, the fit I achieved is not worse than the expensive pair I tried on the shop. It's not any better, either, but it's at least at parity.  I could definitely have gone through several more rounds of muslins (and probably driven myself up the wall with frustration in the process) but for now I ran with "good enough!" and moved on to the actual trouser pattern I wanted to make.

Burda 01-2007-108A

(This was the point that I realized that I had really picked the wrong Bootstrap sloper for the trousers I wanted to make. I should have bought/used the version with a waistband.)

This is Burda 01-2007-108A. I picked this pattern because it's straightforward and has all the key features I wanted: straight-leg, with a waistband, a fly, rear darts, and front pockets with a horizontal opening. This pattern is written for a non-stretch woven, which matched the inexpensive navy cotton/poly twill fabric I had on hand for this pair of trousers. I had 2m of this fabric but I only really needed 1.5m.

I traced the new pattern and then overlaid the Bootstrap pattern I'd worked on over the top. This would have been easier, of course, if I'd picked the right sloper, but it was just a case of pinning together the waistband and leg pieces as if they were a single piece and then drawing the new pattern over. I'm pretty sure I introduced some stupid mistakes in the process -- definitely I screwed up the rear dart placement -- but I did manage to put together a working pattern.

Fly front. Actual fly: good! Pocket bags that peek out: not so good!

A good thing about my pattern choice, which I actually didn't realize when I picked the pattern, is that this was this issue's "Sewing Course" pattern and therefore came with extensive, illustrated instructions. Most of trouser making is not actually at all challenging if you've made anything at all with a waistband before, but the only previous times I made a fly front (two summers ago, on some skirts) I really struggled and they looked rubbish. The instructions for the fly for this pattern were really good though and I am very pleased with how it turned out. I made a couple of goofs -- somehow forgot to understitch the pocket bags so they pop up annoyingly! -- but overall I'm happy with the sewing on these trousers.

Trousers on me from the front

From a fitting perspective, the front looks pretty good, and the side seams are nice and straight. My main problems have always been at the back, though. When I look at these trousers on me, it's clear to me that there was extra width added at the outer thigh by the Bootstrap sloper (where I don't need it) as well as the inner thigh. I ended up adding yet more width to the inner thigh to eradicate drag lines, but I didn't take it off the other side. There's this empty, saggy line to the outer thigh as a result. The back darts are in the wrong place because of the way I merged the two patterns, and they look rubbish besides.

Trousers on me from the back :( I have very little idea how to fix any of this and believe me I've tried!

There are obviously still other fitting issues at the back overall, not all of which I understand or have any idea how to fix. Also, wow, the photos look 100 times worse than when you see the fitting problems in the mirror. /o\ This is where I really do have to remind myself that imperfect trousers are still better than no trousers! Also: this is not worse fit than I achieve from RTW. I just don't worry as much about RTW fit.

The problem I think overall with trouser fitting is one of the uncertainty of time/effort vs. reward. I feel like I could easily spend another 100 hours on muslins and fitting and the outcome could be anywhere from "amazing trousers that fit perfectly" to "no change from what I've achieved so far: still pretty rubbish" to "I might as well wear these like a bag over my head because it's such a disaster".

I also feel like I just don't GET trouser fitting in some fundamental way, probably because spatial resasoning has never been my strength. (It pains me to admit this -- I wish I were good at everything! But spatial reasoning and I have never been the best of friends.) I really struggle with the logic behind the pattern changes required to change the fit, and I don't really understand why some changes work (or don't work). Plus, trousers seems to be such a shifty mess of "change one thing for the better, everything else gets worse!". Argh. In a perfect world, I'd go do a trouser fitting course, but that's only going to be possible when (if) I get better and can leave my house for more than half an hour at a time!

In the meantime, I am not entirely sure how to proceed with my next pair of trousers. The fabric I bought for them is quite stretchy, which means finding a Burda pattern written for stretch and seeing if I can translate some of the adjustments I made into that new pattern. I might take a break from trousers and make something else easier first though!