And Operation Awesome Pants is a success!

I completely was not thinking about this when I picked out the rest of the outfit, but I somehow ended up styling them rather like the original Anthropologie picture for their public debut! My thought process was way more "ooh, now I can finally wear that ModCloth vest I'd debated for ages before caving and have barely been able to figure out what to wear it with since." But here's my picture.... (please ignore the frizzy hair and shiny face, this was taken just after making multiple trips up and down the stairs and out to my car in 98-degree weather to unload from last week's dogsitting job)

And here's the original model shot. I don't even have that much pink-- the only reason I have this shirt is basically due to a wager of sorts with one of my friends (i.e. she'd go hiking with me if I wore a pink shirt, since it's my least favorite color.) Crazy, huh?

Anyway, how did I do? I do wish the lacing was closer in color to the actual pants, but I know that making it from the linen would not have worked with the eyelet holes--as it is, this cording just barely fit. So the tea-dyeing was the closest I could get.

And a shot of the back. This is hands-down the best pants-fitting job I've ever done.

A few close-up details:

Of course I had to put an interesting button on. I've had this one in my stash for years-- I think I originally got it thinking it would look cool on jeans. (I have another one, so I still might try that.) I think it's supposed to be a sundial of sorts, since there's little Roman numerals etched around the edge-- 1 through 24.

The waistband facing and some of the seam finishing. I did the Hong Kong finishes on the straight seam, and for more difficult ones like the ones in the pleat and the curved crotch seams, I did more of a zigzag seam finish. (I took a tip from Sunni over at A Fashionable Stitch and did the zigzagging more next to the edge than over it, like I've always done before-- I never thought to do it that way! The linen is so fray-prone that it looks very much like I just stitched it over the edge anyway, but I'm hoping that will prevent it from happening more.)

Incidentally, I think this cotton print that I randomly had in my stash was the perfect complement to the caramel-colored linen! And I managed to use up all but one largish triangle, which I have plans for....

This is certainly the best-looking/most painless fly-front zipper I've done to date. Does that mean I've conquered my nemesis?

The one thing I do still need to do is figure out how to best finish the ends of the cording--it's just a braided cotton, so it could easily get unbraided and turn into fringe. Which, just, no. I don't really have enough to tie knots at the end-- as it is, I barely had enough to knot the ends of the lacing itself! But I wasn't going to let a little detail like that stop me from wearing them today. (It's just going to stop me from washing them quite yet. Which is probably TMI.)

Anyway, since this project's been well over four months in the making, as well as the major hold-up in my Summer Essentials plan, it's good to finally have it (basically) done! I'm feeling rather accomplished. And in need of a quick sewing project. I sense a quick-n-dirty refashion in my future....

2 cool things:

1. At long last, the Anthropologie pants are done! I finished hemming them this morning. Pictures are going to have to wait, as this is the last night of the dogsitting job and I have nothing better than a house with limited light and my phone camera, which will not do them justice. But I'm wearing them to church tomorrow for certain (the one time I'm glad of the extreme air conditioning, because I won't melt in them until I go back outside--hopefully the linen will be ok for the drive home!) So I'll take the pictures tomorrow while I have them in an outfit and all.

2. I forgot to mention in my last post that I won a giveaway! Alessa at Farbenfreude had a giveaway for her birthday recently, and I won a copy of Sewaholic's new Lonsdale dress pattern! (Which is great, because I meant to get it in the pre-order, got sidetracked by life, and missed the deadline.) I'm really excited about this pattern--it's not often that I've seen a maxi-dress pattern that actually is fitted in the waist instead of that empire-waist cut, which is what's partially foiled all of my previous attempts to make one. This just might be the one that works for me. I can't justify jumping into the upcoming sew-along, because I've had a couple of sewing projects come up that I need to get done that have August deadlines. Plus I only have 2 1/2 of my 5 planned Summer Essentials Sew-along pieces done, and it's nearly the end of July. (And I feel like I should make up the Crescent Skirt first, since I've had that pattern and the newly purchased fabric for it sitting around for a couple of months.) But it'll be good to have the posts there for when I get to it--and while I have nothing in my stash in sufficient quantities for the maxi-dress, I do have a print that's been there for years that will probably be absolutely perfect to test the pattern out with the shorter version. Thanks again, Alessa!

Speaking of those summer essentials, since I'm using my current knitting project as one of the five, I guess I should also mention that as of tonight, I'm over 20 rows into the back. Spent some quality time tonight with a beloved movie I've been meaning to re-watch for awhile and the knitting needles. So I'm something like a fifth of the way there (dummy me, I should have written down the total number of rows, but I don't think I did.) I am getting a little nervous about having enough yarn to finish, since I was well into ball #3 by the time I got done the front and I still need to have enough left for the neck edging and sewing it together in the end. They still have it at the online store I bought it from (assuming I finish this up quickly enough that they don't run out), but I don't know if it would be the same dyelot. Plus I hate to place an order and pay shipping for one ball of yarn....

Sneak preview

Or at least as much of one as I can give with a crappy phone photo. I haven't been home much this week, because I'm dogsitting for a friend who is currently out of the country. But I have had to go home for part of the day the last couple of days, mostly for flute-teaching related reasons. My hours at my retail job also got cut back (the bad time of year) so I've had a couple of hours to kill.

The lacing's not a perfect match, but I think it's as close as I can get without making it out of the same fabric. (Which will make it too thick for the buttonholes anyway.) The inside seams are all finished (at least as well as I can for some of the more curved ones), the outer waistband is on, and the fly-front zipper is in. A lot more winging it this time, since I was inexplicably unable to make heads or tails of the directions this time, but a lot fewer hot dates with my seam ripper. So I guess that's a success. I also ended up having to go back and topstitch all over the pleat to give it more definition, since it just looked like super-baggy pants when it was on. On the plus side, around my waist/hips/thighs, this is hands-down the best-fitting pair of pants I have ever made so far!

I've been without my sewing machine while I'm here (I've learned from previous times of watching this particular dog that sewing is not a compatible activity, because she will inevitably try to walk on freshly-ironed pieces or drop a drool-covered toy right in the middle of my fabric). So I've been doing a lot of knitting. As of Monday night, the front of the tank I'm making is all done! Other than weaving in ends and doing a neckline bit. I cast on the back yesterday, and am something like 3 rows in. Hopefully this half will go quicker than the first one.

Of sewing pleats and sweater(ish) progress

The pants are nearly at a point where I can start constructing them normally. But since several of you have expressed interest in how I'm putting these together, I thought I'd share how I ended up adding the pleat to the front. At this stage, they're looking really good, so I'm excited! (And fervently hoping they still look this good once it's all together.)

As mentioned in the last post, I cut a long, stretched out trapezoid to actually sew the pleat in. So this is the super-extra wide legs with the trapezoid in the middle.

I also stuck a scrap of silk organza into the seams on the inside, to help reinforce/stabilize the eyelet buttonholes I knew I'd need to make.

I understitched the seams, pressing them towards the trapezoid, to give it a nice clean finish later. The pants are box-pleated, so I figured it would be ok to stitch along the inside edge where the pleat insert is.

The buttonholes were the first serious obstacle here. I played around with several different things. The eyelets were too small for the cording I have and I couldn't make them much bigger, the stitched circles seemed too flimsy, and while the metal eyelets would give a cleaner finish, I didn't trust them to not pull out. Especially since they weren't really going in that well in the first place. So I ended up having to actually hand-stitch all 24 of those little round buttonholes! Mostly. I used the circle stitch to give it a nice edge to work from/mark the placement for me. But that took about 3 days of all the sewing time I had.

I think it was worth it in the end, though. Look how clean and pretty they look!

Next step was making the actual pleat. I'd already turned and pressed the seam edges before I did the buttonholes, but I re-pressed those edges to reinforce it. After playing around a bit, I decided that it would work better to just have the edges meet in the middle all the way down the leg, rather than to press the same amount in all the way down and leave a wedge of the inner pleat fabric showing. More Anthropologie and less the effect of ripping a slit up the front of my jeans and sewing fabric in to make instant bell bottoms, like I did for Spirit Week one year in high school. So I carefully folded and pinned the whole thing down, trying to keep it as centered as possible....

...and then I flipped it over and pressed it on the wrong side so I could keep the iron right by the edges. I didn't want to accidentally melt the pins into my nice linen! The other thing I did was to use a trick I found in the linen section of Claire Schaeffer's Fabric Sewing Guide-- apparently pleats set better in linen if you spray it first with a 50/50 mix of water and white vinegar. The pleat came out pretty crisp, so I guess it worked! (I guess the real test will be after the first time I wash them....)

And here's how it looks right now-- a nice pleat going all the way down the leg, which I imagine will show the flare from the inside of the pleat as I walk. Hard to tell with just one floppy piece of fabric hanging near my leg, but that's how I envision it working.

The other slow project is the tank top I've been knitting. But I'm almost done the front! At least, until I have to deal with neck edging. I have the second half of the top front to knit up, but the good thing is that taking the stitches off the holder and getting the knitting going with a new ball of yarn there seems to have worked pretty well. I obviously haven't been working on this a whole lot in the last several days, namely due to buttonholes and a concert I was playing in that had rehearsals every day of the weekend. But the one half knit up pretty quickly, so I might be able to get this part done if I just sit down for a night and do it.

And here's a closeup. It's supposed to be wavy ribs like that. I kind of wish I'd gotten this done earlier this month, because this would have been a perfect shirt to wear for Independence Day, with the rich blue color and the reddish/blueish metallic stripe that runs through the yarn! Oh well, maybe next year.... I should have it done before THAT, right?

Back to the pants....it's alteration time!

Warning-- super pic-heavy post coming up!
It took awhile for me to get going on my next Summer Essential again--got interrupted by the necessity of a laptop bag, work, and travel. But hey, travel gave me something sewing-related to post here! A couple of my good friends and I went to Hogwarts (technically Universal Studios in Florida, though we spent most of our day there at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter section), and I couldn't resist taking pictures of the magical sewing supplies in the window of the wizard tailoring shop! (No, you couldn't go inside, it was just a storefront. But still.)

I thought the tape measure cat was pretty cute. In the other window, there was a tape measure that unrolled and retracted itself, but that was a little harder to get pictures of.


Anyway, back to work!

I started working on altering the actual pants pattern a couple of weeks ago, but didn't quite finish until this weekend. So here's what I've done so far. First thing was to fix the crotch on the regular pattern (that's a pretty big scoop there! But for some reason it worked...)

And since the welt pockets didn't work out so well on the shorts, I changed the front to be a side slash pocket. Horizontal welts wouldn't work so well with the lacing. So now I have 2 pocket pieces.

I also discovered that the pants were already pretty flared. So adding another piece for the pleat would basically turn them into a tent for each leg. So since I was retracing the entire pattern for the purpose of adding the waistband anyway, I went ahead and straightened the legs some--took about an inch or so off the bottom of each seam. I figured that should compensate for the extra width I'm adding to the front, so hopefully I'm right!

As for the pleat itself, I don't have a good picture of it yet, but what I ended up doing was drawing a sort of stretched out trapezoid-shaped piece that runs the entire length of the leg. Since the leg is seamed down the middle anyway, I was thinking that adding a new piece of fabric would be a much easier way to add the pleat and maintain the fit that I already tweaked, rather than just combining the two pieces. Plus then the grainlines would have been all wonky on one side of the leg. Don't want that. It's about 4" wide at the top and 7" wide at the bottom, so once it's sewn in and actually pressed into the pleat, I think it'll end up being fairly close to the original leg circumference. (If I measured it right off of the pattern, the leg hems are originally 28.5"! Love those hippie flares!)

On Sunday, I cut into my linen. I'm doing the same thing with the facings here that I did on the shorts, and using a cotton print (from the stash, of course.) I'm also planning on Hong Kong seam-finishing as much as I can, since I know the linen is going to have a tendency to fray, so that'll be a good way to use up most, if not all, of the rest of the cotton print. I'm going to do the actual waistband facing a little differently this time, though. I'll go into that later.

Since I don't have my retail job today and I have a nice chunk of time this afternoon between students, my goal/hope for today is to get as much of the front sewn together as possible. Here goes nothing!

p.s. I actually may even have a knitting update soon, since I have actual visible progress. But today, sewing comes first.

Good news, bad news (and a random question)

The good news: The test shorts are basically done. I finished sewing in the waistband facing today, did the button and buttonhole, and hemmed them.

I like the way the facing turned out--I was able to use up a nice chunk of a "fat quarter" piece in my scrap bin. I think I got these Celtic knot pieces in my Christmas stocking several years ago, and I'm finally finding ways to use them! I decided to hand-stitch it in, because I figured it would look nicer than topstitching it from the other side.

The fit is pretty good. Not too many wrinkles in the front...

...and though this picture is terribly blurry because the lighting in here kind of sucks for photos and I was holding the camera behind my back and taking the picture in the mirror, hardly any wrinkles at all in the back. And no gapping at the waistband! This is huge for me!

But the reason these aren't the final photos yet is this:

I had an unforeseen problem with the welt pockets: I underestimated my hips. :-P I wasn't expecting them to pull apart quite this much, and frankly, the inside of the pockets just looks bad. To the point where, as it stands now, this is only wearable with the longest shirts I own, and I don't think that would necessarily look good with such a long pair of shorts. I think I can salvage these so I can actually wear them (I mean, shorts that fit!)-- I have fabric left, and I'm going to try hand-stitching a patch into each of the pocket linings so that the outer fabric is showing instead of the wrong side of the pocket lining fabric. But this also means I have to rethink my pockets a bit before I can do the pants. So here's what options I'm looking at:

• I can change the placement of the pockets, perhaps moving them a bit more off my hips and more onto my thighs. (But then, my upper thighs do tend to protrude a bit too, as I learned from the many, many jeans muslin fitting issues I had. So this may just move the problem elsewhere, rather than fix it.)
• Theoretically, I could change the pockets to horizontal welts. Except that would pretty much kill both the lacing and the pleat, which is what makes these pants awesome.
• I could eliminate the welt altogether, at least for side pockets, and instead just do regular side-seam pockets. Right now, this is looking like the safest, and therefore the most likely, option. And if I really want to do the welts, I could add a back horizontal welt pocket or two.
• Theoretically, I could also eliminate the pockets altogether. But pants without pockets are dumb, IMO.
• I could leave the pockets as is, and cut the back side of the pocket out of the linen so that all you see But I don't think that will eliminate the gapping problem (unless adding the pleat adds enough fullness back in that it closes it up.) Part of whether I consider this is going to depend on how my patch job looks, I think.
• I'm not sure that widening the welts themselves will help. That might just make it harder to sew in.

So perhaps the lesson here is that curvy girls shouldn't have vertical welts on their pants?  I'm sure there's got to be a way to make this work...

Ok, random question time. I'm thinking it's about time that I did another blog giveaway. So I'm wondering, what sort of thing would you all like to see? Something handmade by me? A book? A gift certificate? Some kind of craft supply? I know the focus has changed a bit this year--still primarily a sewing blog, but I seem to have picked up some knitting bloggy friends since I picked that up. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

How to (possibly not) put pockets into vertical welts.

It's been a rather experimental week here at Casa de Sew-and-So. First up was trying to get the pocket bags into the shorts, which I'll go into more detail with in a moment. I've also got a yarn-dying experiment going on as I type, and my wrap that I finished a month or two ago (finally) blocked and drying out in the yard. So hopefully those will turn out well.

I found it surprisingly difficult to find suggestions and/or tutorials for getting the pocket bags into vertical welt pockets! It seems like everything I checked out--books, blogs, Google--was geared more towards the little rectangular ones that get attached to horizontal jacket pockets and such. Nothing on pants pockets. And BurdaStyle instructions being what they are...yeah. No help there. So here's a little mini-tutorial on how I did it-- both so I can remember it once I get to the pants, and so if anyone out there is having a similar problem, hopefully I can help you out a bit. (Note: This is not a tutorial on making the actual welt part of it, because there's a bajillion tutorials on that already, and this was only my first set. And therefore not as clean a finish as I'd ideally like--hoping I can avoid the corner puckers next time!)

(Second note: With everything being dark on dark, this isn't the best tutorial pictorally. But if people are interested, I can redo this later with more and better pictures once I get to the pants. Since they'll be lighter, things might be easier to see.)

So here's one half of the front of my shorts, with the welts all sewn in and basted shut and ready to go. The first thing I did was to pin one half of the pocket (not sewn together yet) onto the shorts, wrong sides together. (In retrospect, I probably should have done the right side of the pocket to the wrong side of the shorts, so it would look a little better inside the pocket. Oh well, you live, you learn.) I pinned all around the welt to hold it in place as firmly as possible.

The next thing I did was to baste along all of the long edges of the pocket-- both the outer edges where they joined the shorts, and the inner edge where the two welts meet--through to the pocket layer. This was to hold it in place, and to give me a cut line. (No picture of this step, sorry!) I did it by hand since I'd have better control that way, and the longer stitches would be easier to rip out later.

Then I cut on the wrong side of the pocket--first along that center basted line, and then the two little triangular snips at either end, just like for making the welts. So it looked kind of like this:

>-----<

Again, you can't really see the basting, since I used light blue thread against that mottled green background. But I promise you that it's there.

The next thing was to fold the cut edges back along the basting, like I'm doing here. Not quite all the way to the stitching, since I did my basting right up along the edge, because you want the machine to catch the stitches. (Otherwise, it'll be like the second pocket I did, when it was much later at night and I was just trying to get this step done, where I almost entirely missed it and had to hand-sew things.)

I pinned from the right side of the shorts, just to make it easier to get them out--you just have to check to make sure the fabric is being caught by the pins underneath. Then I just did a basic "stitch in the ditch" all around the pocket.

This is where I should have taken a picture of the underside with everything stitched up. But I didn't. Again, sorry.

Next step was to layer the outer pocket on top and stitch it up. I did regular stitching on the curved edge, followed by a zig-zag right on the edge to give it a nicer finish. And then I just machine-basted it to the top and sides, a little within the seam allowance.

Then I undid all of the basting that was holding the welt edges closed, and was left with this. (See what I mean about the puckers? But at least I have a nice pocket to shove my hand into now.)

So there you have it. There's probably a better way to do this, and if anyone knows of one and wouldn't mind sharing, I'm all ears! Otherwise, again, if this is something people are interested in, I'll redo the tutorial with more pictures when I make the pants. Just let me know.

90 degrees and rising...

...makes it a good day for sewing shorts! Especially since I actually had some time to sew today! And the Summer Essentials Sew-along officially starts today!

First thing I did today was trim those seam allowances down to my usual 5/8". This picture is the center back seam, and you can see what a drastic change I had to make here! For the majority of the rest of it, though, it was just a case of trimming off the extra 3/8" I added to get a full inch seam.

Once those were all trimmed down, I took off what was left of the waistband seam (had to undo it partially already for the trimming), then the side, inseam and crotch seams. Next thing I did was sew the darts and the seams that run down the middle of the front legs. The twill seems more prone to fraying than I thought it would, so I'm edge-finishing the seams with the overlocker-esque stitch on my machine. I don't have anything close to the right color thread for my serger anyway, and was feeling too lazy to bother setting it up and rethreading it as a result. Plus this twill also seems to show marks when pressed, if the back darts are any indication, so it's probably just as well that I give it a lighter finish. Incidentally, this has me thinking that for the linen pants, I may Hong Kong-finish the seams on that, since linen will fray even worse. But I'd rather save such a time-consuming process for the pants.

Next thing I decided to do was tackle the welt pockets. A first for me! I marked the pocket on one side of the shorts, and then decided it looked like it was awfully low. So after holding it up to myself to confirm this,I ended up moving the welt about 2" higher. (The red line is the new one.)

Then once I had the new pocket line marked, I interfaced where the opening was supposed to go. The tutorial recommended pinking the interfacing, but I decided to use some really lightweight stuff so I just tore it. I didn't want to mark the actual cut line on the outside (not sure how well this chalk pencil will wash off), so I hand-basted the line instead, using the pattern as a guide.

Next up was doing the actual welts. Which turned out to be much more simple than I thought, thanks to some nice instructions in one of the books I have here. So here they are, all basted shut and pressed and everything. I wish the corners were laying just a bit flatter, but overall, I'm thinking not bad for a first attempt. (And that I maybe need to press the one on the right a bit more.)

The only thing is, I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to put the actual pocket pieces in! Burda's directions are being typically hard to decipher, and all of my on-hand resources seem to focus more on welt pockets for jackets, so they just have small rectangular ones. So this is going to be my stopping point for the night, in order for me to do some more internet research. I need to switch to knitting now anyway, since I'm going to be hanging out with my crocheting friends all weekend and would like to get a few more rows done on the tank top first. That way I can just do a more brainless pattern and be social!

Testing, testing...

Warning: The following post contains pictures of me attempting to fit pants. Or pants-like things.

I've gotten the test version of the pants basted together, and spent some time this afternoon tweaking the fit. Here's how the process has gone so far:

Step 1: Added all of the markings that didn't happen in the original Frankenpattern. Which turned out to be way more of a trial and error than it should have, at least for the first piece, because I hadn't finished my first cup of tea for the day at the time and forgot that my seam allowances are currently 1" and not 5/8".

Step 2: Discovered my first pattern tweak-- apparently I mis-traced one of the waistband pieces (out of the magazine, and so much has been said about Burda's new pattern sheet layouts that I don't think I need to go into more explanation there) and one ended up longer on a side than the other.

But that was an easy enough fix. I trimmed them to the same width on that edge and marked the difference for later. (Slightly harder to fix will be my discovery right after that I'd only cut 1 facing piece for each waistband instead of 2. I guess I'll have to dig in the remnant bin again and see what else I have, since I'm pretty sure I don't have enough left of the piece I used to cut those and the pocket pieces. If I have enough at all.)




Then came the fun part: basting the whole thing together (sans pockets and facings and zipper fly bits) to see what the situation would be.

Actually, it was pretty close on the original pattern. (The top row is the "before" pics for the pattern sewed together on all given seam allowances, and the bottom row is the "after" pics after I tried a few of the tweaks I learned from the jeans class. Fronts and backs are diagonal to each other, because I messed up on the Picasa collage layout before saving and couldn't edit it.)

The main problem initially was, of course, the crotch. Lots of pulling and sagging and whatnot. I also had to take in a little bit on each side and at the top of the back to fix some gapping issues.  It's still not perfect, but I think it's about as good as it'll get, at least with this fabric. It's a kind of stiff twill, so it just doesn't have much in the way of drape to hang well in the back. As for the front, there's still some creases, but I'm becoming convinced that pretty much any pair of fitted-at-the-top women's pants is going to do that, since it seems like, in my cursory glance over the internet just now, even skinny models with no hips have those wrinkles when they wear pants. (At least, in the initial Google image search, and on Anthropologie. On a side note, these pants aren't there anymore. So this has to work!)

I've got my pattern pieces basically prepped for alterations now, except for trimming-- the orange line is the new seam allowance, and the purple is the new cutting line. This piece (the back) was the most dramatic change. Most of the rest of it just involved taking in the tops of seams about 1/8" or so. I'll need to add just a little bit to the center front, too, since I had to flatten out the curve there and it seems like it took away from the seam allowance somehow.

Next step: I need to take these shorts apart again, since they're only basted together (though I think I'll trim the seam allowances down a bit first.) Then it'll be sewing them together for real, mainly to give myself a bit of practice on the two techniques that concern me in here: the welt pockets and the fly-front zipper!

And Operation Awesome Pants is underway!

At least in the testing phase. I figured I'd go ahead and document the process a little more closely--both because my idea to copy the Anthropologie pants seemed to generate some interest, and because this might help me for future pants projects! I'm not quite working on the actual pants yet-- I'm using up some stash to make what I hope will be a wearable muslin, though in a shorts version (since I'm lacking in those anyway.)

So here's where things stand so far-- all of this was done last Tuesday since I had unexpected time off work, though I haven't touched it since. (I just haven't had time to post, which is probably just as well given all the problems that Blogger had last week. Haven't had time to sew, either.)

I'm using elements of three different patterns to try and get this to work--the laced-up pants that was a purchased pattern, the waistband and fly front from the shorts, and the welt pockets from the second pair of pants (in the magazine.) All three of these are Burda, so I figured they'd be fairly easy to mix and match. For the sake of clarity, let's say the laced pants pattern is A, the welt pocket pants are B, and the shorts are C.

I traced out the various pieces I would need (though the legs of the pants are shorter), then got to work on the alterations. The first thing I tackled was the welt pocket from B, which is a vertical welt leading into a full-sized pocket. So I laid that over the side front of A and reshaped the side to match.

I didn't realize this when I got the pattern, but the front of A is actually split into two pieces! Which I'm hoping will look ok for the shorts. I'm actually quite happy with this discovery for the real version, because that is going to make adding a pleat to the pattern much easier.

This was me making the actual waistline....

....so I could check to see how the waistband of C matched up. The shape was almost identical, actually-- I just needed to fix the length a bit.

The waist of A had a facing rather than a band. So the next step was to change this to use a waistband instead. I just traced the edge of the C pattern, then added seam allowance (the more solid line that's closer to the top.)

Then I repeated this for the back, which was slightly complicated by the dart.

Once all of the pattern pieces were altered and trimmed out, I laid them out on the twill. For the test version, I extended the seam allowances to 1" instead of 5/8", so I'd have a little extra room to play with for fitting purposes. I just drew the seam allowances directly on the fabric with a disappearing marker.

And here's everything cut out and ready to go! I think I'm going to tackle this in a few stages. The first is going to be just a basic fit test, which will be all basted. Then I'm going to unpick the sides and do the actual welt pockets, because I've never done one of those before and I'd rather have a practice run. I also need to make sure that the fly front is going to work, since I've had trouble with those in the past.

Like I said, I haven't had time to touch anything sewing-related since Tuesday, though. Things have been super-busy over the last several days, and so the only time I had to actually sit down and sew would have been Saturday night after work. But by the time I got done with that, I was lacking the brainpower to tackle something as complex as merging three patterns. So what I have been doing is a little bit of knitting, and a little bit of sweater unraveling. (I caved and got a small tabletop swift from an Etsy shop, and a ball winder from Amazon--the ball winder isn't in yet, but the swift did arrive, and it's making unraveling those thrift-store sweaters so much easier already!) So there probably will be a knitting update post before too long....but not now, since I have to run off to the next job.