As I mentioned before, I made pants! I made, what I consider to be the prettiest pants I’ve ever made. Sadly, not everyone agrees with me and apparently I look like a hillbilly. I will be ignoring the nay-sayers and continue to wear my fancy pants.
Anyway, these were fashioned after a free pattern. The pattern is called the Helena Culottes by Ralph Pink and can be found here. The pattern looks to be shortish pants, but when I made a muslin they already reached the halfway mark of my calves. I decided I wasn’t going to wear shortish pants anyway, so I added one A4 to the bottom and decided that that should be long enough to wear. It turned out that I was right!
The pants were made from a red thin wool fabric. It feels like I’m wearing pyjamas that hug me the entire day. It’s wonderful. I especially like the side view. The second picture is the front, with three covered buttons on it. These buttons are just decoration, they are not functional. In the original pattern, the flap wasn’t supposed to have the fold over that my version has, but I’m too short waisted apparently for the original pattern.
The amount of closures is quite large. The first layer is a waist stay to keep the pants up (the beige thing). There are also zip ties in the darts for a bit of stiffening. The waist stay has two sets of hook and eyes. The next layer is the zipper that closes the pants, and the hook and eye at the top of the zipper. The last layer is the snaps. There are two large snaps attached to the waistband and eight small ones to keep the flap flat. There are also two pockets in the front and two double welt pockets in the back. The welt pockets only took 3 times each side, I was staying up too late to work on those. However, they did work out wonderful, I’m also not scared of making them anymore.
In my opinion, pants don’t usually fit me this well, so I’m planning on adapting this pattern to become a multitude of different things. I’m going to try to make ‘normal’-waisted pants, a playsuit and maybe a swimsuit? But that’s all future talk. First I’m going to try to finish a long sweater, a scarf and a shirt with little vintage people on it. Wish me luck!