Goodbye, skinny jeans

After the great success of the shorts, I was keen to crack on with the trouser version of Mum's vintage pattern. As someone who has obediently followed the skinny jeans trend for the last decade - despite their tightness, tendency to fall down and their generally unflattering shape on me - I am now very ready to jump ship in want of a looser fit.

On the first day of our honeymoon in December, I packed Tom off with a local friend in Auckland so I could explore some of the city's fabric shops. I spent a very enjoyable hour in Drapers Fabrics, inspecting the bolts thoroughly and dreaming up new garments. I came away with two perfect trouser fabrics. One was a lightweight monochrome-striped cotton, and the other a medium-weight crepe in the most beautifully warm and rich blue. (This picture does NOT do the colour justice!)


Over the last month, I have sewed up both pairs and I am massively excited about the results.

First were the monochrome stripes. I cut the pattern to the full trouser length, using my previous edits to loosen the waistband with narrower pleats and darts. I took care to get the stripes exactly vertical across all my pieces, and did my best to align the stripes where they joined along the centre seams, and from the waistband to the trouser legs.


As with the shorts, I added belt loops and made a belt with a matching fabricated buckle.

Having seen on the high-street lately a wave of wide-legged cropped trousers, I spent a couple of days agonising over whether to shorten mine, turning them up and trying to get a feel for how they would look with various footwear. But I eventually chickened out, worrying they might make my legs looked a bit stumpy, be less versatile and age faster fashion-wise.


Plus they look fab full-length anyway! I just have to hope they don't immediately get scraggy from dragging along the ground...



I still really wanted some lovely cropped trousers though, so Trousers #2 were more of a leap of faith. I studied the shape and length of the ones I liked on the Topshop website, and decided I would like them cropped mid-calf and more billowy than the last pair.



Again I used my edited pattern for the waist, but this time I also altered the legs, taking a conservative 10cm off the length (with the intention of probably shortening them further), and flaring them by 5cm on the outside leg and 2cm on the inside. Before hemming them, I tried them on with my various footwear again, and then cropped them an extra 10cm.


Now I am completely in love. Particularly with a pair of heels on, they look super-chic. They even make Grandma's old hand-knitted jumper look glamorous!





(As a technical note on working with crepe: it was a lot trickier than the cotton. It doesn't much like to be folded and tends to slip around a lot. It also becomes quite bulky when lots of layers are joined together, like around the waistband. I think it would have been wise to make the front pockets out of a much thinner lining fabric to avoid some of the bulk, but a lot of steaming with the iron helped to keep them looking sleek. Steaming was also absolutely essential on the side seams to have the trousers hang well.)