Vogue 1050 complete

I had very high hopes for these pants but my end result was far from good. I will share my failures with you because I need to bitch to someone about my plight  I think we all learn something everytime we pull a chair up to our sewing machine.

Cons:

• I hate the fabric I chose, it is a cheap polyester and I thought the drape would be nice and the fact that they shouldn’t wrinkle very much.  In the end the sheen it has screams cheap 😦  The drape is quite stiff and does not hold any sort of crease, which of course is uber important for the large pleat at the side seam.
• The invisible zipper was a bitch to put in for some reason.  I don’t usually have such hardships with zippers but its obvious a weakness for me and I need to practice. There is a slight bubble or weirdness to the back center where the zipper is…..maybe I will wear a long coat with these pants lol
• The waist band turned out a little wonky and in hindsight I should have had the zip go all the way up to the top of the waist band.  I have a hook and eye closure at the top, but this left a gap that is pretty unsightly.
• The fabric does not hold a crease well, and the large pleats on the side seam doesn’t fall as nicely as I would have hoped.

Pros:

• I do love this pattern. I think now that I have made a sloper for myself (another post about that soon) I will use these design features and try these pants again with appropriate fabric.
• hmmmm that’s all I got I loved wasting 15-20 hours on these pair of “what the heck are you wearing” pair of pants it was good experience and practice…..lol

I finally bought the frog closures. It was hard to find a color I felt would go with the grey and black. I was trying to find a silver or grey of some sort. There aren’t many choices at my local craft store so I just got black. Let me just say I hate hand sewing and applying all these frogs by hand was time consuming and tedious!

Again I tried to hem these as long as possible.

If I am brave enough to wear these in public I think this pattern and fabric will look really cute with these pants. The peplum top will cover the waistband. This was another craftsy steal at $12.94 for the material and pattern! I was going to get the link for you guys but it seems they have sold out of this kit.

Constructing Vogue 1050

I have been working on this pattern the last few days and I want to share my experience with you.

After the tissue fitting and cutting out the fashion fabric, I basted it together to check the fit. Here are some pics of that. Some of the drag lines I have are simply because of my hem dragging on my feet and the floor.

I am pretty happy with the fit. As you can see I chalked my seam lines.

I recently found out that traditional measuring tapes have an exact width of 5/8 ” How did I not know this??? This makes it so easy to chalk my seam allowance and get rid of the “fit insurance”(AKA bat wings from my previous post). For those of you that might not know this, fit insurance is when you give yourself an extra 1″ on the side seams (total of 1  5/8”)  seam allowance incase you need some extra material during the fitting process.

Ok so my next task was to work on the wide pleats for the side seam.  Sandra Betzina recommended a zig zag stitch to help with the drape….hmm didn’t see the point of that so I did not heed to the warning and sewed this up like I normally would.

The fabric I am using has a sheen to it and very slippery during constructing these pleats. I used “the trim” (more on that later) and tried to initially based them together 4 thicknesses together slipping and sliding AHHHHH! I stopped and went to get myself some double-sided sticky tape for basting (also recommended in this pattern!)

Notice I used the double-sided sticky tape through all thickness of the trim and the pleat!

Here is a good picture of the difference the tape and the zigzag stitch made. My settings were 1.0 and a length of 2.5.

Post correction pleats are all basted together with no puckers. Huge difference it lies completely flat!

I chalked my guidelines where my folds will be:

Here is the panels inserted between the front and back sections:

I must stop and tell you this important tip about this pattern. It has the pleat section as well as “TRIM” pieces. If you want the trim to show all the way up to the waist band then by all means use those pieces. If you want the pleat to disappear at the hip where the frog closures will go (as in the picture on the front of the pattern) then DON’T use the TRIM.

I made this mistake and everything is serged together already so guess what….yup I am sticking to the trim 🙂 It actually looks nice and gives you the illusion of longer legs. I’m short so that works for me!!

Here is my fitting with the pleats (AKA vents) in:

I am quite happy with the fit but I will have to add some darts front and back because it is still quite loose at the waist. I did not want to fool too much with the side seams because they need to be fairly straight for the design element of the pleats.

My next step is to put my darts in place, attach my invisible zip and then try them on again to see if the waist area fits better.

My fashion fabric does not hold a crease well and I may have to go in and do a small stitch on the fold of the pleats to hold its shape better.