Fitting Alex

Alex and I had our first fitting session yesterday and it went rather well.  She is 24 years old and 5'3" tall and quite thin though curvy. Not an once of fat on the girl!   When she was still in Korea I sent her links to several Burda pants patterns and this is the one she picked.

At 5'3" we won't make the cuffs and she has decided that she doesn't want the waist to be so high.  It's 1 1/2" above  the waist so I'll remove that much.  I cut a 36 at her waist and a 38 at her full hip.  I needed to take out the hip  and take in the waist, though I have to be careful not to over fit  the pants.   She figures now that she can eat bread again she'll gain back the 9 lbs she lost in Korea. She thinks she's too thin and she really is.   I took out the  seams which are there to facilitate shaping it above the waist.  Fabric is the last of the 130's wool and cashmere I had bought at Mood  for her for a 3 piece suit.  It's silky and gorgeous. Neither my dd or my dh, who read this, understood what 130's meant.  It's thread count and fine woolens start at about 100 and goes to 200 which is way more than I can afford! Mood carries fines suitings, which this certainly is.  I'm lining in stretch Bemberg rayon.  I noticed on Net a Porter that a pair of wool pants by Marc Jacobs without stretch had a stretch silk lining.  Pants linings often tear; they don't give and the usual advice to cut them a bit smaller than the outer pant is one of the reasons for this.  I sew the sas at 1/2" instead of 5/8" and just take a tuck at the darts and that helps them to stay in one piece. Stretch  should keep the lining  from tearing without sewing it larger.

Fitting issues in the pants:  Not a whole lot.  Far cry from fitting pants for myself!

They are too long, but that's to be expected.

The tightness in the full hip that I mentioned

The back below the rear end has some wrinkles pointing to the back crotch, so I pinned out about 1/4" here and then took out a little more, you can see it in the right hand picture, and gave her a little more room.  I repinned the side seams at the hip to give her back the room I took out at the center back.  I know that this sounds counter intuitive, but if you think about it, it's like making making the back crotch hook longer but it doesn't change the angle of the inseam which is a good thing. It works.  I got this from a series of fitting articles that Joyce Murphy wrote for Threads several years ago. If you've got old issues or the DVD they are worth looking at.

The pockets are gaping, but I think that this is more to do with the fact that I didn't tape the diagonal than any real issue with the fit.

You can see from the photos that I marked the grainline on the outside and this makes it easy to tell how the pants are falling and points to possible issues.  This is why I don't do wearable muslins!  An oxymoron if ever there was one. 

The grainline needs to be perpendicular to the floor, as does the side seam.  It's a little off here I think, but it's also a little loose as the waist. 

 clicking on the photo should enlarge them

If you change the side seam make sure that both the back and front outside seam are the same shape because if it isn't it will cause pulling.   It looks good when she is standing, but I don't like the excess fabric at the base of the zipper when she sits.  Alex says it's fine, but I'll bribe her with another quad shot vanilla latte and have her try them on again.   I  pinned out the crotch below the zipper to straighten out the front seam and this should reduce the excess fabric there.  Otherwise, they look pretty good and any other fine tuning I can do in the good stuff.

As well as making her pants I am going to alter the matching  jacket  I had sent her in Korea.  It's too boxy(she insisted on fitting this over layers and she would have put on more but I put my foot down)and I didn't like how the sleeves were hanging.  Seth to the rescue. He's the expert seam ripper in the family and   he undid the lining at the hems and took off the sleeves.  I pinned them back on and rotated until the wrinkles disappeared.  The skirt also needed some alteration.  It's high waisted and I put in a too short zipper.  I wanted to alter it when I made it for her, but she kept saying it's fine.  Well it is when she's this thin, but it's hard to get on when she isn't.  I forgot that you need to add the height above the waist to the normal 7" long zipper opening.  Seth took it out and I'll redo this as well.  Now that she's back in the States she'll need the interview suit that we had planned.  We are also going to make her a funky leopard pencil skirt with fabric from my stash.   

That should keep me busy for awhile.