Hot Patterns 1115 Classix Nouveau Dressy Jeans

Does it look like the illustration? If I were 6' tall, sure.  But seriously, I do like the fit of these jeans.  There is no way my pancake flat ass is going to be wrinkle free, but I can live with that.  I finished these in January but never got around to photographing them until today. I've worn them a lot and made a second pair, but I tried to make the fit more 'perfect' and they don't fit as well as the first pair. I  removed my alterations to return to the original pattern.  Actually they fit better before the holidays but that's life.  The knit top I made  after Thanksgiving.  Since it's basically my tnt t shirt, there is nothing to write about except the fabric, which is a gorgeous rayon lycra knit from Emmaonesock. I have found that the silkier the rayon knit the more it has a tendency to pill. This one has a dry hand that wears really well as well as feeling wonderful.  

Back to my jeans. How many muslins did I make?  Who knows, I've lost count. One thing I do recommend if you are about to embark on a jeans fitting odyssey is to make your muslins out of denim. When I found stretch denim on sale at Fabric.com I bought about 10 yards. Even that wasn't quite enough, but I persevered and finally got to a  pair of jeans that I can live with. Several years ago I had attempted jeans but gave up because I had so much trouble using topstitching thread in my Viking Platinum 850. Since then I'd bought a vintage 6010 Viking which  plows through  topstitching with jeans topstitching thread like a champ.  It was a pleasure.  I do use a Schmetz denim size 100 needle, the largest I can find. It sews through layers beautifully.

Don't overfit; you'll get a pair of jeans you can't sit down in!  Remember, we are used to seeing perfect, wrinkle free clothing in magazines.  Not so easy in real life, especially if you are an older woman and gravity has hit or you have pancake butt like I do.  I can get a pair of trousers to fit perfectly, but jeans can't because of the nature of the draft and the realities of my body.  It's ok. I can't find a pair that fit better than this in rtw and certainly the price for jeans in high quality fabric  is ridiculous.  

In this pair I ended up taking two darts in the back yoke because it was too big. I could have recut it, but I'd already topstitched and besides, who's going to see it if I don't tuck in my tops? There is a seam in the center back waistband.  Again, no one is going to see it, it uses quite a bit less fabric, and it provides a place to adjust the fit.

Brian Sews has a nice set of videos on applying a jeans tack button and installing rivets. But I found it hard to get them installed perfectly with a hammer. They kept falling out in the wash. Enter my husband's addiction to machinery auctions. He has two arbor presses, the smaller of the two,see below, now resides in my studio and  applies both tack buttons and rivets perfectly.  In the photos below you can see him installing rivets and a tack button on my jeans.  You still can't apply nipple rivets without crushing them, but if I want to use them he says it's easy to drill a hole in a piece of steel that will fit the nipple and keep it from getting crushed.  

Mood Fabrics periodically has email sales of 50% off selected fabrics. A couple of weeks ago it was Marc Jacobs denim for $5 a yard, which just  happened to be among the samples I had ordered from Mood sometime last fall.  It was also my favorite of maybe 20 samples, so of course I snapped up enough for 3 more pairs of jeans.  I also have some Japanese denim that I bought for 3 times the price from emmaonesock,  plus some colored denim, enough for 5 more pairs of jeans.  

Hopefully the next post will be my finished blouse. Have a wonderful weekend.