The pattern is the Winslow culottes from Helen’s Closet.

NGL, after the Oxbow pants, this project is giving me whiplash. The vibe is super duper roomy!

I am aiming to finish my pants or at least make substantial progress before our sessions which will give me more time to explore the design and draft.

There are still many fitting adjustments that will be needed and I anticipate particularly adjustments in the amount of ease, particularly for the larger sizes.

What is great about this pattern is that it will give us an opportunity for a refresher on basic crotch seam fitting, crotch seam 101 if you will.

We will cover how to make decisions with body neutral fitting, why an extension to the side seam is needed even if the pant lots of ease, and how this approach differs from traditional fitting. The latter one especially can be a stumbling block for many; it takes active learning like riding a bicycle and once it clicks it’s yours for life.

September 19th/20th

Session 1: Crotch seam 101

September 26th/27th

Session 2: Decisions—Waistband width, pleat location, ease, length, fabric, pockets, invisible zip construction

October 10th/11th

Session 3: Finale

See below for designer discount code, project worksheet, live session details and links.

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Let’s acknowledge this response is well-meaning, but think I lost patience for the sentiment it represents. It feeds into nostalgia and assumptions that stigmatize the practice. At a time like the present, we can’t afford that type of sentiment.

Making your own clothes is not a hobby. It is not a craft. It’s not even really about ‘sewing’. It’s a necessity as fundamental as food. And not just because it’s hard to find anything that fits and you actually want to wear in the ocean of RTW.

In a world where the fashion industry is the world’s №1 polluter, learning what it takes to make clothes is a necessity as long as getting dressed everyday is a non-negotiable. Yes, there are lots of ways to learn, but making your own clothes provides an education like no other. Plus it’s easier than one might think and has beneficial side-effects.

Carolina Herrera Rose-print wide-leg Diane Pants $1,490. A novice can make these. I maintain there is no other garment that is as worthwhile to make yourself as much as tailored trousers.

At the same time, let’s recognize that not everybody is going to make their own clothes or even consider doing this. My older female relatives would have been horrified that I’m spending my time this way. Climbing out of poverty meant you didn’t make your own clothes. The fashion industry is more than capable of making excellent clothes with respect for the environment and the labor of the people who make them. The factory is still a more efficient way to produce clothes.

The goal is not to insist that everyone makes their clothes but to change the system.

The DIY community

I am so proud of the maker community. I believe we have a key role showing how it is possible to exist beyond fast fashion, to have clothes that represent our authentic selves. People who make their own clothes foster a greater respect for garment workers; probably all my friends have heard me talk about how much one should expect to pay for ‘simple’ clothing alterations.

Although I know most of the students I talk to won’t be making their own clothes I know they will consider fabric quality and purchase more carefully after handling a collection of swatches.

In addition, and the focus of my interest in garment fitting, is how the DIY community brings the bodies, particularly the marginalized bodies not served by RTW. There are many examples of these types of bodies but two major groups in particular; fat bodies and old bodies.

Here is a chart showing the hip size range for trousers in some popular brands:

In the MPWM I have frequently referenced Tibi as an example of high-end RTW. Yet if your hip size is over 45¼ inches, the discussion is purely theoretical, the Tibi trouser does not exist in your size.

There is one brand, Alice&Olivia not shown because their website didn’t provide a body size chart for the garments. Instead it made me (take a deep breath here) enter body measurements, height and weight! After sharing all this personal data the website returned a message:

Here’s the punchline. The data I entered was for the median adult US female.

Cue red mist descending, FU Alice&Olivia.

Fat bodies don’t have the luxury of making clothes to save money or to fine tune Tibi trousers. There’s literally no other option.

For the older bodies, it’s somewhat a different experience. Often you read online comments like “When I was younger I could wear anything/the garments were great out of the envelope with no adjustments but now necklines choke and I can’t get anything to fit”.

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A couple of you wrote to me about fitting the Oxbows with traditional fitting methods. Nothing wrong with this of course. If your fitting process, or decision making is traditional but you use a waistband and a half-pant prepared the TDCO suggested way, what I term the platform for fitting, this still provides an huge advantage over measuring yourself and adjusting the pattern before making a toile. But it did make me reflect on how I can encourage people to shift approach and ways to demonstrate this process because that empowers you to use the toile to troubleshoot beyond macgyvering.

Full confession, I myself tried some macgyvering at the outset with the Oxbows. This was my first toile, right out of the packet, no adjustments:

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The fit issue is the need for more torso circumference:

The pants fit perfectly everywhere except at the center front.

Traditional pant fitting methods assess the figure and its variations. The ‘problem’ is the abdomen the recommendation is to ‘add the extra fabric where it is needed’, i.e. at the center. Cue the full tummy adjustment:

Intuitively this adjustment makes sense

and there’s nothing wrong or incorrect about this approach.

But it is not the only adjustment possible!

In body neutral pants fitting, we fit center out.

The center refers to the center line on the body.

The extra fabric needed to allow the crotch seam to map onto the body center comes from the side.

The maker gets to decide if the fabric is added equally to front and back and where it blends into the original side seam.

Here are just a few of the possible options:

And here is @meriam.thesewist putting this into action on the ill-fitting RTW jeans:

With great results!

The Center Out Concept

In this example, adjusting center out has some obvious benefits; not having to mess with the fly front and flat fell crotch seam.

Are there additional benefits to fitting center out?

The concept for fitting pants center out is more than positioning the crotch seam at the center of the body.

It is key for guiding fit decisions, hence the term TopDownCenterOut (with apologies to British English spellers).

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Here’s where I arrived at this week with my Oxbows which I will show you in the live session coming up. It is different to the first round of fitting I showed last week. Although it was a great crotch fit, I had to revisit the adjustments in order to have the hem be on grain.

As we know, the architecture of pants is akin to a tensegrity structure, all parts must play nicely with each other. There’s always more than one way to achieve a particular outcome.

The beauty of this system of fitting is that we can play around with different combinations on the same toile as we decide what works best for the version of the design together with our body.

Decisions are not always straightforward. At the initial stage there is no commitment, it’s just a first date. If the crotch seam fits but refuses to play nicely when the side seam is adjusted, we undo and start over1.

As is obvious from the above diagram I lowered the waistline considerably. I’m still procrastinating over that decision but I need to pull the trigger and I’m grateful for the MPWM participants that help me keep it moving along!

Transfering adjustments to the paper pattern

Transfering the adjustments to the paper pattern needs some refinement and here is where curved rulers come in handy.

For example I am thinking of refining part of the side seam like so:

Using the curved ruler is described in this post .

Here is the downloadable version of a hip curve. Previous MPWM participants have t his already, what is new is that I have updated with a metric version! There is one version for a home printer and a digital version for projectors.

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I started making my own clothes out of need. When I heard terms like ‘the cut’ of a Charles James sleeve it sounded deliciously pretentious but I had no idea what that meant. Later I realized this simply referred to cutting flat cloth into the pieces which get assembled to create garments.

There being an infinite number of ways to cut cloth there are an infinite ways to create garments.

As makers, we understand the design from the POV of contractors, taking the raw materials to the finished product.

Take a basic tube, the humble toilet roll:

Put the toilet roll into water and the seam holding it together dissolves. The tube unrolls to its flat state (search with the terms toilet roll and bunting to see several examples1).

Pretty cool, but what made me jump out of my seat when I saw this was that the unrolled flat cardboard shape was a lozenge; the tube is cut on the bias!

I guess I naively expected it would be created from a rectangle. Much simpler.

TWO different cuts, for the SAME silhouette!

Why is the cardboard of the toilet roll cut this way and what can this tell us about clothing design?

To answer the first question, download the Toilet Roll Test pdf file. Print scaled to fit on any regular printer (A4 or US letter).

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For those of you who could not make the live sessions, the topic was tight pants and the contemporary pant draft.

In summary, we chatted about:

1. Waistline considerations

2. Fabric strain

3. Gussets

4. Crotch point position

5. Fabric properties

6. Darts, the waistband and the crotch seam

7. Psychology of a close fit and shape

It is a lot. And often quite subtle.

But pant styles are all about the subtleties as appreciated by the keen eye of Darryl in this sketch from The Office.

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I get it, a tight fit isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it is perplexing when I see talk about tight pants as some sort of entirely separate fitting challenge. Not to burst anyone’s bubble but getting a good fit for tight pants is no different than fitting loose pants. It requires no more expertise than for any other type of pant. You can do this with body neutral fitting!

The same fitting principles apply, the crotch seam is still a line, the fabric is still flat, only the design has changed.

So what’s the the deal with tight pants?

The difference between tight pants and looser pants is less ease.

Revelatory, I know!

For background, please read the post on crotch ease.

Design

When we were making the Olive pants, we discussed how trousers occupy a sweet spot on the body-costume spectrum. Precision in fit is often associated with closely fitted clothing. Many assume that a looser fit is more forgiving but it is more demanding because the garment is responsible for defining the silhouette1.

Tighter pants like the Oxbows are more defined by body contours. We are moving away from trousers towards leggings. The good news is this gives us an obvious guide when it comes to customizing the design, namely the silhouette of the body.

Relating Draft to Design

The challenge of tight pants is the challenge of fabric manipulation.

The not-secret secret about woven fabric is that it is flat and passive. We all adore fabric, but maybe we can admit fabric alone can be somewhat boring. It is merely the substrate.

To get fabric to wrap around the body it needs to be coaxed. The stiffer the fabric, the more persuasion has to happen. Again, there is no secret to how this is done, it requires cutting fabric into pieces and stitching it together aka The Cut.

When fabric is following the body contours more closely it has more work to do and needs more persuasion.

For example with a trouser, the fabric can drape right off the buttocks like the water off Niagara Falls.

Note in the example above, we can clearly see two legs but it is not clear that the. person has two buttocks.

A closer fit requires the fabric to bend around the butt in two directions and then bend again to go under the buttocks. A tighter crotch seam makes the fact of two buttocks quite obvious for that 🍑 look.

Woven fabric will obligingly bend in one direction, it is not super keen to bend in two directions at the same time. It needs help and this is where the fabric whisperers aka designers come in.

It is important to understand all the ways the draft accomplishes design.

Next up:

Key features of a close fitting pant draft. Plus thoughts on the challenge of fitting tight pants and how you can partner with the draft and be the boss of getting the fabric to bend in all the right places.

Please comment with your thoughts, questions or concerns you want to share about the design, draft, fit or construction of a tight pant.

A reminder for the Oxbow pant MPWM2 live session we have coming up this weekend. This post has all the details.

Join me as I look back on the journey.

Previously

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The Waistband goes from Afterthought to Main Attraction

I was trying to understand where and how body measurements could be used for more accurate pattern drafting.

The waistband is generally considered as an afterthought, a way to finish off the top edge. A pattern piece that should be simple to draft.

After experimenting I realized one of the problems was that there was no accurate way to accommodate variables such as how much the individual is comfortable with the way the waistband squishes the body and the style of pant. Such factors are very personal, there is simply no way to know this in advance. Two individuals could measure the same but end up with different waistband lengths for the same style of pant. The same person might fit waistbands differently for different styles of pant. And we have previously discussed how small inaccuracies have large impacts on fit.

What I was finding suggested that the waistband needed to be considered as an independent unit. Hmm … could the waistband be fitted separately?? The waistband always comes last in traditional pants fitting.

What if I switched this up—and put the waistband first?

It seemed incredibly weird to just fit a waistband by itself, but I tried it.

Wow! I was in shock! Immediately I could see how this gave me a level of precision that improved fitting by a order of magnitude. A major difference. And yet so incredibly simple.

I concluded that making the waistband foundational and independent1 of the pant leg provided a way to circumvent many pants fitting problems.

Some have pondered why fitting a waistband like this was not already routine for custom pants fitting.

One suggestion is that fitting in the DIY world is a version of what happens in the professional atelier. In a professional atelier, asking a client to fit a waistband by itself would be too ridiculous. And maybe not even necessary as the clients are not fitting themselves or the atelier is always making the same style of pant2.

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In the DIY world we are NOT in the professional atelier. We are an atelier of one.

We are not creating a pattern or a new design. We already have the blueprint and the design (thank you awesome designers!). We are adapting the design for construction onto our unique landscape.

The waistband is a power player

There is a lot more to the humble waistband than just holding up the pants.

As I delved deeper, I came to understand how using a real waistband had many benefits for people fitting pants by themselves. As an aid for fitting pants it was a game changer.

Read more:

Fitting a waistband shares some pointers about how to fit a waistband

Moving beyond the binary discusses different styles of waistband and why you don’t have to stick to one team.

The toile is a half-pant and a complete waistband post introduces the platform for fitting plus suggestions if your pants pattern does not include a waistband.

Next Up

There is obviously a lot more to pants fitting than dialing in the fit of the waistband but I now had a starting point.

With all the size variations in a commercial pattern, we can learn a lot about the design.

One issue that comes up frequently when fitting solo is how to make changes in the crotch seam.

This post covers some crotch fitting basics showing the Coe Trousers as an example.

Pant drafting textbooks show the relationship of the body with the pattern like this:

When you look at the image it is easy to get the impression that fitting the crotch is all about the negative space:

This leads to the idea that the shape of the curve should reflect the shape of the body:

As a result, traditional fitting advice is all about adjusting the crotch curve on the pattern to mimic the outline of the body. Cue all the fitting methods with a bendy ruler and aluminium foil crotch shape such as this one from the classic textbook Fitting and Pattern Alteration.

The problem with this approach is that it is limited.

It is limited because the crotch seam is a line not a shape.

The crotch seam is a line and a line can be placed on any shape.

The good news

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It was the fear of cutting that had me stalled. Bias has two directions (left and right) which could behave very differently depending on fabric.

You might want to cut all the pieces in a single bias direction like the Burberry pants1 (below left) or alternate directions like the V2140 pants (below right).

All this is separate to any considerations when using a directional fabric, like this example:

Oh the possibilities!

While I was procrastinating, DJP came out with the Highland Pant, a bias cut pant with no side seam combining front and back.

Theoretically, with 2 different bias directions, there are 8 possible ways to place the pattern. Each pant requires 1 pair.

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The process began with a body evaluation: age, height, size and figure features.

Pattern companies are like mini fashion houses and if you work in fashion, this approach makes sense. As the designer, you know the design well, the unknown is the client’s body.

In contrast, if you are making pants for yourself, you are already familiar with your client’s body. In body neutral fitting the starting point is considering the design. Body neutral fitting does not mean that we avoid discussing the body. Rather, we consider the body in relation to the design.

Getting to know the design

The design comes to us in the form of images and a pattern. We are creating a garment in the same way a contractor creates a building from an architectural blueprint. In our case, we are both contractor and also providing the landscape on which the building will be installed.

Coe Trouser Design

The Coe is by no means your traditional trouser.

In particular, the side front is cut with a significant curve while the side back has much less of a curve.

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For a general guide to preparing and fitting a waistband, please refer to Body Neutral Fitting: Pants pages 21-23.

And Substack post Making a Fitting Waistband Contoured Edition.

Coe Trouser Waistband

The Coe trousers have a classic one piece contoured waistband.

This WB is cut differently to our previous example of the Shop Pant with a straight grain section at the center back rather than the center front.

Waistband landmarks

The waistband has notches shown in red above. These notches indicate where the waistband matches up to the pant leg during construction.

This pattern does not come with a notch for the center back. I recommend marking CB as it is such an useful reference point. To identify CB, fold the pattern piece with the back dart notches on top of each other. CB will be right in the middle of these notches.

Where is Center Front?

The button is positioned offset from true center.

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Links and details below

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An eclectic mix for sure!

Here is the compiled, quite long list for voting:

Oxbow pants by SewHouse7

Phen Wrap Pants by ReadyToSew

Hugo Pants by ReadyToSew

Linden Pants by Tauko magazine

Luce by Tauko magazine

Chelsea brocade cigarette pants by Mood Fabrics

Chess Club by Gertie

Polly by Melilot

Saga Pants by Tauko Magazine

Coe Trousers by DJP

Thea by Style Arc

Worship Jeans by DJP

Matchbook Jeans by DJP

Julia Jeans by Just Patterns

Tessa High Rise Jeans by Seamwork

Why is the list so varied? Probably because we have people at all different stages of making and exploring pant styles.

My personal preference would be the Oxbow pants for a tight snatched a$$. Or the Chelsea brocade cigarette pants because I wish to cosplay Miuccia Prada. And I believe those patterns offer us new style and fit possibilities we have not yet explored.

Read on to vote!

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Previously

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Big C

Where we left off I was pondering pants design and fit. Meanwhile I found myself dealing with another problem. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Chemo, surgeries and radiation treatments; it was a lot to deal with.

To distract myself, I spent time on Instagram. And looked at a lot of images of pants.

Even experts found pants perplexing. Here is David Page Coffin1, explaining why he had to copy RTW to to achieve a well fitting pants pattern:

“I eventually got a better basic pant pattern from a borrowed pair of Dockers than from any of three custom fittings from tailors and full-time fitting experts, all of whom got reasonably close after lots of tinkering….but the dockers just nailed it”

Everyone agreed that pants are hard to fit. But why?

Just why are pants sooooo difficult to fit?

All fitting issues ultimately need to be translated back to the flat pattern.

The language of pattern making

Pattern making took me right back to childhood. My Grandpa was a commercial furniture maker. Technical drawing was a key skill of his trade. When not watching the boxing or horse racing he would teach me stuff like how to precisely divide any line into 13 equal parts using only a compass.

As a kid I thought this was all somewhat passé, useful tricks for a pre-CAD era. It made pattern draftingsee so familiar. Open a pattern drafting book and it’s mostly technical drawing—draw a horizontal line perpendicular to another line, divide by four, add an inch, swing out an arc of measured radius, connect point Oo to Qq etc. The numbers come from body measurements rather than interior spaces and furniture but the approach is the same.

The heyday of manual technical drawing was the early 20th century. The block system of pattern making as we understand it today was developed around that time.

The premise of the system is that every human torso can be represented in a basic flat pattern consisting of 5 pieces.

Once the basic block is established, one can follow well established manipulations to derive an enormous number of different styles.

It is an extraordinarily simple, powerful and successful system for the fashion industry, but note that at its inception, it did not address pants or trousers.

What about pants?

Why did the system not include pants at the outset?2

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La Sirène sounds way more glam than Diagonal Drag Line Dress. But it is the diagonal drag lines that are the key feature of this sumptuous creation. Let me explain.

Regularly spaced tucks or folds of fabric—excess vertical length—are released up and down the body. Some folds travel around the body to be captured at other locations and others are released to create the distinctive shaping and look.

This vertical arrangements of tucks ressembles festoon blinds:

The swag of the blinds is created with both extra vertical and horizontal ease:

From the waist downwards, the dress releases fabric from center front tucks:

The released tucks travel around to the back of the body.

The tucks are captured in a vertical seam at the back of the body:

And some of the tucks are released without being captured:

How does this explain diagonal drag lines?

It is the relative vertical positioning of the tuck release and capture that primarily creates the direction of the drag lines.

A schematic of the dress makes this clearer:

If we were to cut the dress along center front and back

And then place the front and back half of the dress together as though they were in the same plane rather than going around the side of the body, we would end up with something like this:

In this flattened arrangement, it is clear how the relative vertical distances of tuck release and capture along the center front and back lines creates drag lines.

How does this help us to understand pants fitting?

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Making a garment larger or smaller is achieved by the letting out or the taking in of the seams.

Letting out makes the garment larger, taking in makes it smaller.

Start with any toile, take in seams to make the garment smaller. Give the toile extra wide seam allowances2 and let out to make the garment bigger.

Either situation, bigger or smaller, you are covered with extra wide seam allowances.

Sadly, this approach doesn’t quite work when it comes to fitting pants.

The conundrum of pants fitting

Pants confound the logic of using extra wide seam allowances for fitting in three ways.

First

In the case of pants, letting out or taking in has opposite effects.

Let’s say you want to make your pants bigger. Letting out the side seam makes the pants larger. For the crotch seam, it’s the reverse. The crotch seam needs to be taken in rather than let out.

It gets even worse because not only do we need opposite changes to different seams, the impact of these changes is contradictory. Taking in the crotch seam makes it bigger but also will make the pants seem too tight. Letting out the side seam makes the pants bigger but you may still have a wedgie. To make the pants bigger, both changes need to happen without fighting each other. This gets confusing and I believe is one of the reasons why pants fitting is considered difficult.

Second

Second, seam lines for the crotch and also the inseam are formed from curves on the flat pattern. This makes it impossible to assess the fit with extra wide seam allowances.

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Here we have the same dude in two different jackets:

The diagram comes from the book 'The Second Skin: An Interdisciplinary Study of Clothing” by Marilyn J. Horn (read here).

What constitutes a better fit is somewhat objective but it is in large part the visual look and we can agree that jacket B has a better fit than A.

If we started out with A, we could remove fabric (pink shaded area) and end up with B.

On the other hand we might say that yeah sure we have a better fit, however, this adjustment has altered the design of the jacket.

What we would really like is a fit adjustment that maintains the design.

Rather than remove fabric, if we add a wedge of fabric (green shaded area) to level the hem we could improve the fit:

How would this adjustment would look on the pattern?

Let’s say that the pattern for the jacket looked like this:

This pattern has the back hem drafted on grain. Adding our wedge would change that feature.

You might think, “So what if the pattern looks a little weird, that is just what my body needs for a good fit”. And yes you would be correct.

But the hem is the foundation of the garment. Changing the hem from on-grain to off-grain will change the stability of the hem, maybe impacting the longevity of the garment. It could require different construction techniques, it would change the look if the jacket was being made in a checkered pattern fabric.

In short, this adjustment allows us to maintain the design, but we impact the architecture of the garment, how the draft exploits the properties of cloth.

Other options?

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And indeed the trend with indie companies is for every pattern release to include fitting advice… “here are some pattern adjustments you may with to make…..”. And cue yet another body part adjustment tutorial.

My feeling is that this is pattern companies responding to the expectation of customers who describe a pattern as good depending on how it fits their body. But is that a helpful criteria for pattern evaluation?

Indie pattern companies have a reputation for creating patterns that fit like RTW. Then again, many turn to DIY because RTW does not fit off the rack. Given the number of variables that have to be satisfied for adequate fit of pants, is it reasonable to expect a pattern to fit without adjustments?

I would like to see is more community conversation about design.

Design and the human body.

Design and the relationship of the flat pattern to the design.

Let me show an example.

Here are two patterns for the same style.

The envelope shows that these patterns have an identical silhouette.

And both these patterns are created for the same chest circumferences.

Yet when we look at the pattern pieces, the blueprint itself, we see something quite different.

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