Pants Making Exploration

2024

I am a pretty tall person and always struggle to find pants that fit. So when I was looking to learn how to sew found the idea of making a pattern for pants that would fit me exciting.

Prior to this project I had only ever done some mending work (sewing tears, adding patches) and made a tube shaped cushion for my IDS minor studio course.

I had never made a pattern for clothing and had never sewn a garment from scratch.

For making a pattern for the pants, I decided that I would base them off of my favorite pair of jeans. I looked up tutorials online on how to pattern trace and thought I had gotten it down. However, once I began to sew some roadblocks emerged:

  • I had not made the pattern correctly in the crotch area. I had both not created enough of an angled cut for the pieces to create the desired pocket in that area, but also I had neglected to add a flap for the button piece!
  • The fabric kept bunching up when I was sewing on the machine, as the fabric was pretty smooth and slid easily especially during runs through really long stretches of material (pant legs).

Here is an illustration of those issues and how I addressed them:

After correcting the pattern and fixing my bunched stitching, I was able to have the pieces align correctly!

As mentioned above, I created the pattern based off a pair of jeans I had so when creating the step by step process I took the jeans and examined the stitching on the inside to make decisions about how I wanted to construct these pants. For example, this is why I ended up doing two rows of stitching on the seams and single row of stitching on the top and bottom hems.

Below is my entire process for making the pants:

Overall this project was amazing. Getting to work with a new material and dip into pattern drafting was so fascinating and getting to do focus on all the detail work was really gratifying. I hope to do it again soon!

In the future, I would love to do a remake of this project for someone with a very different body type to mine as an exploration into how to adjust the patterns to fit different body types by still hold a similar silhouette and make my dream version of a pair of cargo pants.