Pants Perfection and Pumpkin Pie

I had two projects on the schedule yesterday. The first was to run up another pair of pants to test the changes we made to the StyleArc Linda pants in my class last week. Ryliss showed me how far back to move that inseam. I tested the adjustment using some black bengaline from Joanns. The pants fit perfectly. I can’t get them to fit any better. Having them on feels like I am not wearing anything, which is my litmus test for the perfect fit. I can move around, sit down, and get up without any binding or shifting. The side seams and inseams hang straight, right where they should.

I said to the husband over dinner that thinking about pants and pants fitting is occupying a great deal of my brain these days. I discovered some YouTube videos yesterday about using the top-down, center-out method of pants fitting to fit pull-on pants—until now, everything I had seen involved fitting pants with zipper flies. I’ll get to those eventually, but now I want to figure out how to offer a class on fitting a pair of top-down, center-out pull-on pants. One of my students and I are going to try fitting a pants pattern to her after the holidays, and I think I’ll use her as a guinea pig for that method.

I recognize that I have had a relatively easy time of fitting these Linda pants to myself. Literally all I had to do was to lengthen the front and back rises and adjust the position of that inseam. The waist and hips required no adjustments. I need the challenge of fitting pants to a different kind of body shape.

[Ryliss pronounced me a “rectangle,” an assessment I am still trying to wrap my head around. I’ve always thought of rectangles as not having much of a waistline, whereas mine is well defined. Apparently, though, that doesn’t automatically put me in the hourglass category. The fashion advice I see for rectangle body shapes advises wearing styles with belts and waistbands to provide figure definition, but I’ve avoided those my entire life because my torso is so long that belts and waistbands are never in the right place. Now that I can make my own clothing, though, I might experiment with some of those styles.]

Once the pants were made and hemmed, I pulled out this pattern:

I bought this pattern last year—and traced it, too, so it was ready to go—thinking I would make it up in a fancy fabric as a possible Christmas dress. I even had three yards of Hobby Lobby red stretch velvet (bought on clearance) for making a muslin. If it bombed, I was out a few dollars. If it worked, I potentially had a Christmas dress should I lack the time to make something else. And that Hobby Lobby stretch velvet was nice to work with—much nicer than its Joann Fabrics counterpart.

The design is dead simple: a front, a back, and two sleeves. I knew that the tricky part, though, was going to be finishing that neckline. Sometimes the simpler designs are technically difficult because there are fewer places to hide mistakes. The pattern specified finishing the neckline with polyester bias tape. Ick. No thank you. I considered making a facing, but decided that was too bulky. I auditioned some fold-over elastic, but truly, FOE is the devils’s spawn. (I’ll master it one of these days.) I finally settled on using a length of the burgundy knit from that franken-raglan as a bias binding. That worked reasonably well. I sewed it to the neckline, turned it to the inside, and coverstitched it down.

(I have no idea why the photo is tilted like that.)

I may still make this up again in a different fabric. I am wondering if I can order some of that printed stretch velvet from Minerva (in the UK) and get it in time to make another dress. This style isn’t fancy or showy, but when I am playing piano, I don’t want fussy clothing. I really like the length of those sleeves, too, because I also hate fabric flopping around my wrists.

We’ll see. I am still thinking on this.

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From the “feeding the gaping maw” department, I made the husband a couple of pumpkin pies on Monday. This is the pumpkin I grew in the garden and canned. When I got up Tuesday morning, this was what was left of the first pie:

People do not believe me when I tell them how much food he consumes. I am glad we had girls and not teenage boys to feed.