pattern: Burda Wide Legged Trousers 10/2010 #104
fabric: cotton linen from The Fabric Store in LA
I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Burda convert by any means, but I AM willing to take this pattern brand off of my AVOID AT ALL COSTS list. As frequent readers may recall, I was on an unsuccessful internet search for a couple of weeks to find a pleated peg-leg pants pattern to sew, and the only thing I found close to what I was looking for was Burda 02/2012 #103A. After learning about and employing the Palmer/Plestch tissue fitting method, I came out the other side of the Burda wormhole with this fantastic pair of pants. While hunting down the pleated pants pattern on Burda, I ended up pinning a few other pants patterns onto my Pinterest board in the hope that, should the pink pants wind up a win for me, I could eventually tackle more pants designs that I have always wanted in my closet but never thought I was competent enough to make myself.
One pair was a slim fitting trouser design with an elastic waist made for woven fabrics, and the other pair was a wide legged trouser, which is the design that intrigued me most. Aside from rompers with dropped crotches and hammer pants, I cannot recall any time in my life where I have worn a pair of wide legged trousers. Was this a result of one of those fashion “rules” I had become so accustomed to, telling myself that I wasn’t fit to wear them because I wasn’t tall enough and would look too frumpy in them? Or because for my entire life, every single pair of pants I had tried on in a retail store, wide legged or otherwise, had fit so poorly that I never knew what a nicely-made pair of wide legged trousers looked like on my figure and therefore couldn’t formulate an informed opinion? The answer is both, probably.
But see, this is what sewing our own clothes does for us- it gives us, those members of the population born into a body that is shorter/wider/huskier/bootier/leggier/boobier than the average fashion model, the opportunity to relearn for ourselves what actually does feel and look good to us on our bodies. How is anyone supposed to think that wide legged pants could look good on them when all they see in the dressing room mirror is fabric pulling tightly at the thighs, a waistband gaping so far from the lower back that their undies are showing, and pant legs long enough that a giraffe would still need them to be hemmed? I don’t know about y’all but I took that information as gospel and quietly logged it away in my brain so that it would be forever internalized; my body wasn’t made for wide legged pants. This information was added to a very long list of other fashion no-nos that I won’t bore you with now, but that I have recently decided to unpack, slowly and deliberately, one style at a time.
As you can already tell, on the list this week? WIDE LEGGED TROUSERS! Spoiler alert: I totally CAN wear them! THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE!
I learned some really interesting things in the process of making these pants that I think have helped make them look like the winners they are, and others that will make them look even better the next time I make them.
As I said before, I tissue fit them first but because they aren’t fitted through the legs, I really only had to concentrate on the fit at the hips and waist, which was pretty easy. These pants are drafted with a pocket stay (HALLELUJAH!!!!) buuuuut I ended up having to sew the pocket openings down because I totally neglected to insert twill tape at the seams and they started bulging out very quickly (and of course Burda didn’t give me a reminder to do this- clearly I still need a bit of hand holding when making pants). I was quite disappointed in myself for this oversight but then I remembered that I have actually never owned a pair of pants with this kind of pocket opening and shape that behaved well. Even if I had prepped the pockets properly I can almost guarantee that they would have needed tacking down eventually. It’s because I have curvy hips and the pants are quite fitted in the butt and top of the thigh area- on trousers with a looser fit in the hips and legs, the pockets hold their shape and look just fine. So next time I will either change the style of the pocket to more of a jeans style where the opening has a U shape as opposed to a straight diagonal, or I will just eliminate the pocket all together. It seems such a shame because not all pants patterns have pocket stays and I FREAKING LOVE ME SOME POCKET STAYS. But it’s fine. The stays give my waist and stomach a bit of extra structure even if the pockets are completely unusable.
The trousers are also meant to have a long straight crease on both the front and back legs, but because my fabric has a softer, flowier hand, the crease didn’t work well with the texture and I ultimately ironed them out. But the lovely Sallie O gave me an awesome tip for my next pair, which is to edgestitch the crease on the pants to ensure that it stays visible and crisp, and I cannot WAIT to try that!
I have no idea what the fly front for these pants was supposed to look like since I ignored Burda’s 6 word construction method for it (LOL, I can already feel Renee rolling her eyes right now!) and instead inserted my own trusty fly that I use for jeans patterns, but I realize now that I gotta broaden my fly front applications before I make any more fancy trousers. I like the way this fly looks and I’ve gotten really adept at constructing it, but a flat fly front with no visible stitching would look even better on this style of pants. Thanks to Renee for the video tutorial on how to make a flat fly front for my future crispy wide legged trousers- I haven’t used it yet but I am excited to try it out.
The most interesting thing I learned about these pants was adjusting the length and width of the legs to match my petite frame. Yes, I think that virtually anyone can look and feel good in wide legged pants, no matter that person’s shape, height, size or thigh depth, but I do think some attention should be paid to the proportions in order to find the most flattering silhouette. A super wide legged trouser on a 5’10 person is going to have a different aesthetic on someone like me, who is much shorter and can get lost in all that fabric. To accommodate this, I took out a small amount of the width from both sides of each front and back leg to equal about 2 inches at the bottoms of the pant legs, which was graded to nothing at the hips and crotch seam. Just looking at how dramatic the pants looked on the model in the pattern photo made me think that they would look huge on me, and I was right; after baste-fitting the pants together and adjusting the back darts a bit, the pants were looking more like JNCOs than chic trousers, but that small adjustment in the width of the legs made a pretty big difference.
The other tricky part was the length. OY, VEY! This is all about personal preference, but that footless looking thing that some people manage to pull off when wearing very wide legs or bell bottom jeans simply DOES NOT WORK on me. You know what I’m talking about…the pants legs with bottoms so wide and long that they cover your whole shoe and you look like you’re just floating around?
What looks even worse to me with this type of cut is that the legs are so long that they usually have a visual break at the bottom, so instead of looking streamlined , the pants fall beautifully til somewhere around the ankle area and then the leg folds on top of itself, ruining the whole silhouette (again, my opinion- I just don’t like this look on ME). But on the other end of the spectrum, if you make a wide leg too short (not to be mistaken with a cropped wide leg, which is a totally different style), then you end up looking like JJ from Good Times, and no, that is NOT a good look on me either.
I realized I needed to know exactly what shoe I wanted to wear with these pants and have them just barely graze the top of it when I was standing still and straight, which made the whole hem rise from the floor a little less than half an inch. Even the tiniest difference in hem length dramatically changed the way the pants looked on me, both when standing still and walking, and I really wanted to maintain that sleek straight up and down look throughout the leg with no folds or breaks at the bottom, so I enlisted Claire’s help with getting the hem straight and precise all the way around. She did a really great job and I am very thankful she was around as I stomped through the house in every shoe I owned trying to figure out which ones worked the best.
Now, for the kicker. I figured out the right length of my pants, but I had cut them too short. OOOOHHH, CRUEL FATE! In an effort to anticipate these pants being as long as the patterns I usually make (once I ended up cutting nearly a foot off of the bottoms of the legs), I shortened the pants legs at the knee a couple of inches, thinking I would have plenty of room leftover for the hem, but I was very wrong, and once constructed, my pant legs were too short. I chatted with Renee about applying a turned-under facing to the bottoms of them which seemed smart, but they were still too short- I had no length to spare, and after determining my preferred hem length, I saw that I actually needed to ADD length to the pant legs!
Where is the slap-my-damn-head emoji??
But guess what, this awesome fabric was really forgiving because it’s got a slightly nubby and loose texture, so I was able to turn my facing into an actual hem. I calculated how much extra fabric I needed with seam allowance and additional leg length, then cut four pieces of fabric out (one for each leg piece), and sewed them together as if it was a facing. But instead of sewing it to the bottom of the pant leg and folding the whole facing up to the inside, stitching to secure, I sewed it to the bottom of the pant leg, treated it like a hem by ironing flat where I wanted the bottom of the pants to be, pressed the seam allowance under, folded that part to the inside, then stitched in the ditch to secure the inside of the pants to the seam. So it LOOKS like a facing, but it’s actually added fabric to the length of pants. Don’t know if I explained that properly at all but hopefully a picture will help.
I googled to see if this was an actual technique before I tried to do it, but I couldn’t find any information about adding length to the bottom of a pants leg and then using that length as the hem. But then I thought, well it IS an actual technique if I successfully do it, right? So I tried it and it worked better than I had hoped. The added seaming and facing add a little heft to the bottom of the leg which helps keep it stabilized, and because my fabric was so flexible and un-crispy, I could get away with adding a bit of business at the bottom without it being very visible at all.
Once the pants were complete with finished hem, I tried them on in the mirror and for the first time felt 100% happy with them- honestly I couldn’t believe my eyes! Throughout the fitting process, adjusting the leg width and the hem and trying them on with so many different shoes, I had convinced myself that they weren’t going to end up looking that great on me anyways. I’m not sure if it was my insecure brain bad-mouthing me or the fact that the pants really didn’t look that flattering while in it’s in-between stages or a combination of both, but at some point I made a promise to myself to finish the pants regardless of their assumed negative outcome. I am not a fan of UFOs and my Butthole Bin™ hasn’t had much added to it in the last year. I felt like I owed it to myself to see the pants all the way through to the end, and if they looked utterly ridiculous, maybe I would be able to salvage them by turning them into cropped pants or cutting off all the extra width in the legs and having them be regular slacks. But obviously I didn’t have to do that- they looked so close to how I envisioned them in my head! The high waist and wide legs gave me the illusion of looking longer than I am and the hems perfectly grazed the tops of my shoes. I was happy with the fit of the darts in both the front and back and the legs didn’t hug my thighs too tightly while still providing a slim-looking fit through the butt.
I LOVED the way they looked, but I only had one last reservation: the pants were…well, not exactly too tight in the waist, but rather perfectly fitted to it due to the fact that I hardly ever add my waistband when I baste-fit my pants (because I’m LAZY) so I have a tendency to overfit that area. I actually prefer snug waistbands to keep everything in place, and this one felt comfortable enough when trying the pants on, but I knew that as soon as I sat down to a meal, that waistband was gonna feel like an iron claw squeezing my guts and creating what we refer to in my household as Lightning Gas™. But the first time I wore the pants out and about, the waistband eased up a lot throughout the evening, probably because this fabric isn’t rigid and has a slightly loose weave. The knees had bagged out a teensy tiny bit (I’m sure only noticeable to me) and were much more comfortable than they were at the beginning of the evening. One other mistake I made when constructing these pants was that I forgot to extend the fly extension lower than what was drafted, which is a mod I make on all my pants since getting my smaller waistband over my wider hips is always an issue once the garment is completed. But with the extra looseness that that the fabric gave the pants after an hour or so of wear, pulling the pants up and down was much, much easier, and now I think they are about as good as they are gonna get!
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