Burda Style For people who sew

Description

Lots of “firsts” for me here with this project… this was the first time that I’ve sewn a pair of pants, and also the first time that I tried to draft my own pattern off of a sloper block. I kept the pattern pretty simple with a wide waistband, a zipper front and single welt pockets in the back.

The pattern drafting went pretty well — I made a few errors resulting in the back piece being slightly longer than the front, but hemming took care of that problem. The main issues that I had with these pants were with the linen — it seemed to just keep stretching and stretching! I used Sandra Betzina’s helpful advice for pre-treating the linen, but I found when I tried on the pants midway through sewing them up that they were already quite a bit too big on me. I ended up taking in the pants at the side seams and reinforcing the waistband with twill tape to help with that problem, but they’re still pretty loose after a day of wearing. Anyone have tips on working with linen? I love the look of it, but I will admit I’m not really so excited about sewing any more linen after this experience.

I got the sloper block as part of my participation in a research project on Cornell’s campus on butt fit in pants. The study involved standing in a giant scanning setup, and then a computer generates a pattern based off of a 3-D image of your body. The process was pretty cool, and I’ve blogged about the process and what I learned from it, if you’re interested in reading

Material Notes

Linen, silk for the lining

Difficulty

Intermediate

Categories

For

Women

Garment Type

Pants

Material

Linen, Silk