jimmy jeans part 7

now that i've fine tuned my pelvic area i made a full pants sloper to see the overall look and feel.  these guys are pretty right on.  they're a little bit looser than i would like my jeans to be, but i think they'd make an excellent khaki or similar pants style pattern.

ahh, there we go.  in reality you can barely tell, but this is just slightly more snug--more in tune to what a jean actually fits like.  i actually cross referenced the width of the legs on my old a.p.c. jeans pattern because i like the fit of those.

it's getting so close i can feel it.  from that final sloper i drafted up a very basic pant pattern with just a front, back, yolk, and waistband to see where all those elements fall on my body.  i made it with a weight of canvas that is almost identical to the denim i purchased.

the fit looks good throughout, although they're riding a little higher than i thought.

to compensate for the high rise i just decreased the height by 3/4" on the front and back.

these feel pretty perfect.  i can't believe how great the ass looks in these!  ethan says they look like 70's leisure wear pants.  maybe i should make a suit!

now i get down to the nitty gritty of drafting the final jeans pattern.

just to make sure i'm getting the seam allowances right with the flat felled seams i did a test run.  i marked the actual seam lines with sharpie, folded, and sewed.  theoretically the sharpie lines should be exactly in the middle of the 2 stitch lines.  5/8" seam allowance works great!

so, this is the to-scale full mock up of the jeans.  of course the only thing i see is those wrinkle lines coming out of my ass.  this picture is the best image i could get (the least amount of wrinkles).  i couldn't figure out how the sloper could fit so perfect and then the butt seam freaks out on me again.  at this point i had a slight melt down.

i spent the next 4 hours taking these apart, re-sewing them together, trying on a pair unworn a.p.c. jeans, quickly drafting up a new pattern with a different slope to the back crotch seam.  the most frustrating thing is that the jeans on the left are with a flat felled seam (like on regular jeans) and the jeans on the right are the same pair but with the flat felled seam removed and the seam line stitched together regular style (the seam stitched together along the seam line).  WTF!!!

in the end ethan talked me down from the ledge.  i had accepted defeat when he came home and said the jeans looked great (some times it helps to just show up and see the final product and not know the process.)  but, my mini-freak out actually did help me learn a little bit.  when i went back and tried on the unworn pair of a.p.c. jeans (the ones i made the pattern from) i could feel how different the fit was compared to my new jeans.  somethings i liked (the rise and amount of ease in the hip area) somethings i hated (um, saggy butt?) but i understood now how those things were effected by my pattern and how that related to my body.  in the end i added the 3/4" back into the rise (really? how many times am i going to mess with the rise?) and added just a touch of ease into the hip area.

next step:  the jeans!!

jimmy jeans part 6

after i had my butt revelation and had that problem under reasonable control, it was on to the next (albeit more minor) problems.  in this image from a few slopers ago you can see how the fabric pulls towards my amazing knock knees.
(i'm quite the specimen, aren't i?)

 to account for this the books call for you to shift in the outlines of the pattern towards the knee line.  the green lines are the original pattern lines and the red are the adjusted lines.  i started with just altering them by 1/2 and inch.

low and behold, it's working!  it still pulled slightly, so after i did this fitting i went ahead and pushed the red lines another half inch in towards the inner knee.

and just like that i realized i'll never be able to make a true pair of selvedge edge denim jeans.  if i had to push the knee lines in to compensate for my knock knees they'll never look right if i push them out again to line up with a selvedge edge.  i'll still use the selvedge denim because it's higher quality, but i won't be able to incorporate it into the final jeans, which doesn't bother me that much considering i don't roll my pants up and you'd never see it anyway.

it's a jeans snob thing.

i maybe did a few more minor adjustments here and there, but the main thing i found in looking at the fit on my ass was that at this point, the major thing was how i was standing.  i came to the conclusion that this fit was probably as good as i was going to get.  the fact that there's still some wrinkled fabric below my butt probably has more to do with the fact that i lock my knees when i stand which actually forces a crease in the fabric between my butt and leg and less to do with how the pattern is actually cut.

yes, i did just make a gallery of my ass.

also, it's worth noting that while making the "minor adjustments" the front and back pattern pieces were so similar that i actually was adjusting the front crotch curve when i meant to be adjusting the back crotch curve a couple of times!

 in the end, this is what i came up with.  it's the best fit so far of anything i've ever drafted (let alone any kind of pants i've ever tried on in a store.)  it still has 1" of ease in the hips and 1" of ease in the waist.  i'll take the ease out once i'm test fitting a full mock-up of a pair of jeans.

this is the final pattern so far.  my next step is to go ahead and make a couple full pants slopers.  i was just making shorts because i knew most of my problems and frustrations were related to the crotch area and i didn't want to waist all that fabric.  the brown line is the final version so far, and you can see all the revisions i made along the way.

jimmy jeans part 5

this is the 2 inches i'm taking off at the center back.  the nice thing about the "menswear" book is that it allows in drafting the pants sloper for you to only go up as high as you actually want the pants to sit.  i didn't have to draft the sloper so that it went all the way up to my "natural waist" (above my belly button) and cut it down, considering that i don't usually wear my pants that high.

the extra fabric was taken out of the waist, but i was still having a major wedgie problem.

actually, it was a little tight up front and in back, so the book said to lengthen both pattern pieces up top equally.

ok, definitely an improvement in the wedgie department, but that still leaves the extra fabric that is pooling below my butt.

i sat on this (ha!, no pun intended!) for a while and then i remembered a couple of diagrams in the "pants for real people book".  it says to make the back curve much deeper if the fabric is still pulling below the butt.

i was kind of stumped at this point so i decided to just say "fuck it" and i tried dipping the curve really far down.  i was very skeptical of this considering i've never seen any pants patterns with a back crotch curve like this.  the diagrams were even in a section called "pants oddities".

OMG!!! i can't believe it worked.  just like that, in five minutes, my faith was restored that i was going to be able to make these jeans happen.  there is obviously still some extra fabric below my butt, but at least it's not "pulling".

note to self: not only do i have a flat butt, but i also have a low flat butt.

tbc...

jimmy jeans part 4

because of my frustration with the last pattern i attempted i wanted to give it a fresh start.  in my research i came across the blog taylortailor.  he has a couple posts of how he made his own jeans as well, and in fact he even made the pattern from the same "patternmaking for fashion designers: menswear" that i have.  in light of how amazing his jeans were i decided to start from scratch again with a new sloper.
so, i drew up a new pattern.
this one i wanted to try out making 2 slopers at the same time to contrast and compare.  i drew up a regular sloper like the one the book instructs, and then altered that so that the outer edge of the pattern would line up with a straight edge-- so theoretically that pattern would be for a selvedge edge denim.  unfortunately, after several attempts at fitting it wasn't working out.  i was trying to make the sloper as i would actually fit my jeans--with no ease.  bad idea!  having no ease in the sloper didn't allow any room for adjustments when it came to fine tuning the pattern.
ugh.  that means drafting a new pattern with 1" ease in the hips and waist.  back to the drawing board.

although, it was interesting to compare the new front pant sloper to the original sloper i made from another book i have called "how to make sewing patterns" (a long time ago).  that book was geared toward women.  and all of a sudden it became abundantly clear how having a book geared towards men's patternmaking is important.  the new pattern is on the left and the old one on the right.  notice the amount of "junk room".

 so here's the new new pattern.  the blue line is what the book instructs you to draft for a jeans sloper.  and then it asks you to alter that draft (with the green line) for a "5 pocket jean pattern".  um, why wouldn't i just do this in the first place?  anyway, so far so good.  but, i measured the crotch length and it was an inch shorter than it was supposed to be so i added it onto the front crotch curve (the seam line on the inside of my legs came a little too forward anyway.)

in making this draft, i also noticed that i measured wrong in drawing one of the lines the first time i tried drafting this pattern, so that would have screwed me up anyway.

here's my first sloper of the new new pattern.  i knew going into it that it wasn't going to fit and i was ok with that.  i decided the first time i started over that i was going to take my time, not get frustrated, and really try to pay attention and learn what i was doing and why.  that's the interesting thing about doing this project at the same time as having 2 jobs and only a couple of hours a week to work in the studio.  it forced me to work a little bit, then step back, think about, and understand what i was doing instead of just barreling forward with my head down just to get it done as i probably would have been doing if i had lots of time in the studio.

the fit in the front was pretty good, the butt is obviously the big problem, and there was a about an inch that i could pinch out from the waist, so i trimmed the pattern down for starters.

tbc...

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...

jimmy jeans part 2

taking into account all the modifications i was doing to my new pattern i decided to see how everything matches up.  (click to enlarge)  the red lines are my new jeans sloper pattern.  i then traced my a.p.c. pattern over that pattern in blue (most of it is obscured by black sharpie).  i never really understood why the center seam on my front was so small, and the side seam line seemed a little far back, so i just shifted these to line up with the a.p.c. pattern.

with the new modifications in mind and a much smaller yolk i made a test pair of jeans out of crappy black canvas.  they fit pretty good so i went off to buy some denim.  with the smaller yolk the pockets don't fall on the crease between my butt and my legs.

i went to mood and their denim supply seems to be dwindling.  i picked one of the two selvedge denims they had.  this is a 12 oz raw denim.  i double checked the denim weight on my a.p.c. jeans and those are 12 oz as well, but this denim seems MUCH thinner.

one of the things i dread doing is truing the denim.  because it's raw and doesn't get washed, ironing the denim so that the warps and wefts match is kind of a nightmare.  because this denim was so thin (and ethan got me a super fancy new iron for christmas) this one trued pretty easily.

i found out a couple days later doing some research that one person says that you shouldn't true raw denim.  i've only seen one person say this (although i don't come across articles about truing denim everyday.)  does anyone know if this is right?

i know i've done this before, but here's some shots of the process.

i will say that this pair came together pretty quickly. practice definitely helps.  i even finally (once and for all) figured out the crazy front seam!

it also helped that the denim was so thin that it was much easier to work with.

here's the finished product!  i think this pair only took about 6 hours (down from 8!) from truing the denim to the finishing stitch.  these are definitely the nicest pair i've made so far.  of course, i noticed after i had sewn the waist band on that the ends don't line up exactly, but it's close enough and i can keep that in mind for the next pair.

t.b.c...

jimmy jeans part 1

i've been working two jobs lately so i've had very little time in the studio, but i'm trying to get in there whenever i can.

disclaimer:  i'm about 3 weeks into this process and as i'm writing these posts i can already see where i've made mistakes.

these are the last pair of jeans that i made.  they're made with the pattern i copied from the pair of a.p.c. jeans and made with black denim.  the denim i got at the time (november) i knew wasn't great, but it's only been  5 months and they're already developing holes like jeans that i've worn for at least a year.  live and learn: use quality denim.

since i needed to make a new pair of jeans anyway i decided that i'd like to actually make a custom pair of jeans for myself.  i'm starting to get the hang of making flat patterns, so i thought this might be a fun challenge.  i'm a huge fan of a.p.c. denim, and even though their "new standard" jeans are the best fitting jeans i've been able to find there are some things that still bother me about the fit. because i have absolutely no ass the fabric below my butt sags.  because of the sagginess (?) of my ass the fabric juts out of my rear at the side.  so, i thought maybe i can fix this for a perfect pair of jimmy jeans.

using the pants sloper pattern from "apparel making in fashion design" i drafted the jeans sloper pattern.

(editor's note: no, i have no idea what's going on with that seam line crazy point on the back panel)

just as reference i placed them against my a.p.c. pattern to compare and contrast.

these are the jeans sloper i came up with.  (i think my second attempt.)  they fit pretty good.  there definitely isn't as much pooling below my ass than on my jeans.

after the sloper was made i started to make a mock up of the basic construction of the jeans: adding back pockets, the yolk, and fly.  (the front pockets don't open)  the front looks great, but once i took a look at that ass i new there were some adjustments that needed to be made.

part of the reason i feel like the jeans sag out along my side after a while is that i carry a wallet and my phone in my back pockets.  because of the placement/size of the yolk on my ass (based on the a.p.c. design) the pockets sit over the crease (where my butt meets my legs) and stretches out the ass and leg.  because of this i'm thinking that a smaller yolk would allow me to raise the pockets up a lot so that they actually sit on my ass instead of sliding down my legs.

t.b.c...