totchipanda

Roommate left this morning for her hometown to spend a couple weeks with her mom, who has been home from the hospital for a week now. I dropped her off, and our other roomie will pick her up, but that did mean I had to get up at the unholy hour of 3:45 am. I took the morning off work so I could go back home and take a nap.

I wore the Pietra pants I made a couple weeks ago as a test to see how they feel. They really are just too big lol. The stayed up where they were supposed to, but as soon as I put anything in my pockets they dragged down. I walked from my home to the pharmacy and then the bus, a total of about one mile, and I have the same issue with them that I do with skirts, in that not enough of my skin is covered and I start to chafe. Not at the inner thigh at least, but kind of underneath my butt cheek. Not comfortable at all.

Since roomie is away, I have like... so much time. We haven't been apart for so long in 2.5 years, and the other roomie works late and im going to bed nearly as soon as he's done. We're going to get very acquainted in this time lol. So i decided to go try out the Thurlow trousers again.

Version 1 (August 2020)
Vague recollections of the changes I made, I think I mostly just added 2" of height to each piece. And like, yikes. It was MASSIVE in the waist and I had to pull it in to a size 12. It just didn't fit and I didn't know enough about fitting pants to have any real idea wtf I was doing.

July 2021: compared the pattern to Pietra and found it was far too short in the crotch seam and at the side seams for me. Did nothing with this information.

Version 2 (July 2022)
I made the size 16 and added only to the crotch seam, using the recent Pietra pant pattern. In total, I added perhaps 2". After stitching, I decided to take in another 1/2" on the back darts. Otherwise, I did not make any changes.

Honestly the fit isn't terrible. It still needs work, I have weird drag lines around my belly, but side seam is exactly where it needs to be. I want to raise the back perhaps 1", I can feel it sitting in my lower back at an angle to the front, like all of my modern pants seem to do. I also had drag lines around my butt and I just need to check the fitting guide from Closet Core to determine what that means.

I also pinned and then stitched up one of the folded hems for the shorts (i always fit shorts first bc most of my fit issues are in the hip/butt/belly area) and they are SO cute like that. I'll make some in a fun colour for summer so that I might actually wear them.

After the magic of pants (shorts, really) that actually fit on Saturday, I spent the afternoon cleaning off the outside air conditioning unit. I thought it was covered in tree fluff, but it turned out to be about 85% dog hair. I don't think it was ever cleaned after it was installed. It took about an hour, including removing the top in an attempt to get at the coil more easily (it was not), and putting it back on. I used a bamboo skewer and my fingies to pull it all loose, and I wore two masks to keep from getting my sinuses full of... whatever was stuck to it. So much dust flew out.

Yesterday I was like YES I'm going to see how my new favourite pattern compares to the Thurlow trousers I made last year, and ended up doing some tidying/rearranging in the sewing room instead. I moved the mirror from its home of 2 or 3 years, measured some spaces to see about more desks for sewing equipment, and then emptied out two boxes of stuff from the old apartment, which def had been affected by the flood. Oh, and I swept the floor, so a year's worth of basement dust on bare concrete and flood-debris, my sinuses were done with that too TYVM. I did lay out the pattern (what started the cleaning/organizing was the number of dust bunnies, and wanting to get at my pattern box) and like... yikes.

I don't think I ever posted about the Thurlow mock-ups here. I believe I was making a size 12, and for a pattern that is purported to be drafted for people with larger hip/waist ratios, I still had too-tight hips and gapping waistband. I had add 2" to the rise since I wanted something that came up over my belly, and I had drag lines EVERYWHERE. I still don't know enough about pants fitting (despite utilizing the excellent and long guide Mala linked in a previous entry) to understand where the issues are (dear high school sewing classes: THIS WOULD BE USEFUL TO LEARN). So they've been in time-out ever since. I don't even know where the mock-up is.

Well I overlaid my modified pattern with the Pietra pattern and I would need to add a little to the inseam/crotch seam and then 2" MINIMUM to front and back. All while still keeping the waist more or less the same. Goodness. I was too tired yesterday to make much sense of it, so I ended up leaving it all on the table and took a nap.

Today I have printed out the plus size version of the pants I tried on Thursday. We shall see how they turn out later in the week.

And thankfully, the heat wave broke on Friday night. Saturday was a pleasant afternoon to spend peeling 3 summers worth of dog hair from the AC unit, and yesterday was also very pleasant. Today it is currently 16C (like... 65F?) and cloudy and it is DELIGHTFUL.