Once again, I am behind with blogging.  I have just started two weeks of holidays and am aiming to get up to date again by the time the holidays finish (my suburb is in a current covid-19 ‘hotspot’ area, so we will be spending the break at home).  Today I’ve decided to share one of my most recently sewn garments with you, as it has prompted a number of thoughts on sewing pants, especially for my body shape.  This is a bit of a marathon blog post!

I have sewn the Style Arc Fifi pants twice before (in wool here and in linen here). When The Cloth Shop, Ivanhoe shared this photo on Instagram of a rayon/poly/spandex check, with Fifi as a suggested pattern pairing, I was right onto it. What a fantastic check – with a number of colours that I love! And a pattern that I already own, and know that it fits and I enjoy wearing!

To refresh you on the pattern details: Pull-on pant sewing pattern with a smooth front yoke, elastic back and side pockets. This new wide leg pant pattern gives you the option of 7/8th or full length. The Fifi Woven Pant is a simple pant to sew that will give you a sophisticated look. FABRIC SUGGESTION: Crepe, linen and rayon.

I sewed size 12, as before, in the 7/8 length, which is pretty much full length on my 158cm tall frame.  I really like the way that this pattern is put together.  Flat fronted, with fabulous pockets at the front, and a wide yoke/casing that has elastic in it to enable you to simply pull the pants on and off.

Because this is a check, I paid attention to pattern matching when cutting out and sewing. Believe me when I tell you that everything lines up on all those vertical seams. Also, I will never wear these pants with the top tucked in like this. These pants fit me really nicely across the waist and stomach and fall smoothly into the wide legs. Hooray! Now, lets take a look at them from the back.

Righteo.  That’s not good.  They felt fine on, looked fine from the front, but these photos are telling me a whole different story!  There are a few things to consider here.

• They’re probably a size too big in this fabric, which has spandex in it.  It doesn’t look to me as though it is just one specific area that has wrinkles, pulls, or excess fabric; most of the back seems too big.  Let’s zoom in a little.

In this photo I’ve got my hands in the front pockets, which takes up a little of the excess space.  There needs to be a certain amount of ease to accomodate that.  But I can still see other issues.

• Folds of excess fabric around the back crotch
• Fabric not hanging straight from the bottom down.

For comparison, these are photos of the previous pairs.  Now, I was possibly a different weight/size when I wore these; my weight and size do fluctate quite a bit, so I am loath to fit anything woven too precisely (one of the reasons I sew pants in stretch wovens and why I choose elastic waists).

That green pair is in linen; I love them! Sewn in November 2018, so I was probably a bit heavier than I am now.

The charcoal wool pair was sewn a month or two prior to the linen pair. Looking at these photos is making me think that my check pair is basically just a size too big for where I’m at now. Fortunately I sewed them on the machine, just using the overlocker to finish the seam allowances separately, so it shouldn’t be difficult for me to take them in. This fabric is worth me doing that.

However, this also highlights an ongoing pants fitting situation for me. My shape is very front-weighted. Here’s some images that I got from a body scanner at a local gym a few years ago when they were trying (unsucessfully) to get me to sign up. It’s not at my current measurements; I’m a few sizes smaller at the moment, but my shape stays pretty much the same even as my size varies.

I really need to find another place with a 3D body scanner, because this is super useful for sewers!  I have always known that to sew for yourself, you need to understand your own body.  As is very easy to see in these scans (taken only wearing underwear), I do’t have a defined waist, my lower rib and pelvic bone have hardly any space between them, I have a lot of abdominal fat, distributed both above my belly button and in the more common abdominal apron below it.  I have very slender thighs, and hips that are barely larger than my waist measurement.  I actually have trouble figuring out exactly where my waist is, which is another reason I like elastic in waistbands.  My bum is relatively flat.  Shoulders are on the narrower side, and quite rounded.  Bra size is a C cup, which doesn’t make for many fitting challenges, but my rib cage is comparatively large, which makes sense when you look at my waist.  What this doesn’t really show is how forward my head is.  The scanner also provided body measurements.

These aren’t my current measurements, but once again it’s fascinating to see the proportions.  Check out the bust/waist/hip measurements; I often find that I range across three or four sewing pattern sizes, and that’s why.  My hips are smaller than my bust (often up to two sewing sizes smaller) and my waist is not much smaller than my hips – which often translates to two sewing sizes larger.  But I am clearly not ‘straight’ or a ‘tube’ in shape!  You can see that really well from the scans.

Yes, front on you don’t see much ‘in and out’ going on (that’s probably a reason why I resist the term ‘curvy’ being used as an euphemism for ‘fat’ – not all of us who have fat are ‘curvy’ in that traditional hourglass sense).  But those angled photos I showed earlier really do demonstrate why I have some fitting challenges.  It’s all about fat distribution, as well as the underlying skeletal structure.

So, back to pants fitting.  You may have noticed that many of my pants have ‘excess’ fabric along the back thighs.  They’re usually okay around the calf, and they’re generally firm around my body.  When sewing pants, I need plenty of room for my belly in the front, and I need to ensure that the waist will be large enough to be comfortable.  I never have issues with getting things on over my hips; as we’ve already seen, my waist to hip ratio is very small.   After many years of attempting to sew pants with a fitted waist, I have given up.  I can make them fit, but I cannot make them fit in such a way that they are comfortable for me to wear, and so that they ‘look good’ to me.  And they never stay up, unless the waist band is so tight that it causes muffin top both above and below!  When choosing a pants pattern, I look for:

• Elastic waists (or a waist that can be easily converted to an elastic one)
• Stretch woven fabrics
• Minimal waist detailing (no-one is ever going to see it)
• If in a non-stretch, plenty of ease.

Alterations that I consider, depending on the base pattern that I am working with:

• Flat bottom alteration
• Grading between waist and hip measurements (usually not necessary with the base patterns that I choose)
• Full belly alteration

But what, oh what should I do if I want to remove excess fabric from those back thighs – especially considering how small they are in proportion to the torso above?  I don’t want to have too much of a lollipop effect!

After a day of wear, these pants are basically just a size too big, possibly exacerbated by the spandex in the fabric. I’ll take them in; this fabric is worth it.

Writing this blog post has been really useful for me in processing the alterations that I should consider when sewing for myself.  There are a few that I make very regularly now:

• forward neck/shoulder
• shoulder width one size smaller than torso width
• short torso length
• removal of waist shaping

It’s not only my hair getting greyer at the moment; my body is definitely shifting as my hormones cause chaos. I suspect that I’ll need to lower bust darts more often, and carry out that flat bottom adjustment.  I’m 52, so this is all to be expected.  I sometimes feel sorry for my husband with a peri-menopausal woman and two teenage girls in the house!

I hope that all this detail and the 3D scan images are helpful for others with my body shape.  I find that there’s not as much information available on sewing and dressing for this shape, despite it being one that many women move towards in later life.  Having always been this shape, with size fluctuations, I select patterns accordingly.  There are many styles that I admire, but know that I would never bother with because it would be very difficult to make them work for me.  Fortunately there are many styles that I admire that I can also wear very happily!