jimmy jeans part 3

so, i finished up this pair of jeans and headed off to work.  despite the weight of the denim i was pretty excited about the jeans.

except the longer i was a working and running around the more and more i could feel the jeans sliding down my ass.  within just a few hours these guys were worse than my worn-in jeans!

frustrated, i put the jeans down and spent several days doing A LOT of research.  i looked up books about pants making and tracked down a denim supplier.

i ended up getting "making trousers" by david coffin, "pants for real people" by pati palmer, and "easy guide to sewing pants" by lynn macintyre.  i was sort of buying blindly, but these 3 aren't bad.  "making trousers" is less about the construction of pants than it is details and finishing.  it also comes with a dvd (which i have yet to watch), but the book is beautiful and offers lots of good suggestions on the finer details.

"pants for real people" and "easy guide to sewing pants" are more concerned with fit--which frankly is my main concern at this point.  "pants" has it's own thing going on with fitting tissue paper patterns to the body and modifying them even before cutting into fabric, but there's lots of good tips and tricks to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.

the other thing i did some research on was a better source of denim.  i got the denim for the pair i just made from mood, and i know from previous experience that what they have on their showroom floor is not the same thing that they have at their warehouse.  i ordered 3 selvedge denim samples from them.  i also found pacificbluedenims.com which has tons of selvedge and regular denim from the us, japan, italy and more.  and their swatches are free!  i ordered some swatches and then i ordered a few more.  i wanted to go for a heavier weight denim on my new pair, much like the levi's i was used to growing up with.

in the "pants" book they have this helpful diagram for what to do for flat butt.

taking a cue from my new book, i set out and altered my pattern.

after i made the alterations i tried on the sloper. (excuse my cameltoe beauty) low and behold, it definitely fit better.  there's still some wrinkles below my ass, but it's much better than it was before.

unfortunately, right after i took this picture i decided to tweak something else, which made something else worse, then tweak, then worse, etc, etc...

the sloper quickly devolved into something that i couldn't wear, and (honestly) i didn't truly understand how i had gotten to this point in the first place.

after being bummed out about it for a little bit i decided that i needed to start from scratch, so, off to the drawing board...