Lutterloh Fitted Knit Pants

 

This is a Lutterloh pattern 249 from supplement 282.  When I made this pattern last I made some adjustments to the pants, but of course now I couldn't remember if I had actually made the adjustments to the pattern or just thought about it. Also, that was three years ago so my body may have changed.  So I decided I need to make another trial pair before cutting into the nice charcoal plaid in my stash.  I found this red plaid ponte in my stash that I figured would do the trick.  The print is asymmetrical so right off the bat I knew it was going to be a bit of a challenge to line up the print.  I managed to get the horizontal lines pretty much perfect but I've ended up with a slant across one of the legs.  At first I thought I managed to twist the pattern on the fabric trying to line up the print or that the print was printed at a bit of an angle. 

   It turns out I had mistakenly drawn the grain line running parallel to the outside seam.  That needs to be adjusted to be centred on the pattern all the way up; that would have it slightly angled out to either side as the pants taper up.  This would split the difference instead of it all being on the one side towards the inseam.  I will mark the centre point on the pattern and make a note there for future uses.  As a plus I did add patch pockets on the back and they matched up perfectly - you don't even see them there.

I spent a lot of time overstitching a false fly on the front of these pants, only to find that once again it doesn't really show up very well.  I may just forgo that next time.

THE WAISTBAND

      

I've included lots of pics for how I did the waistband this time.  With my previous pair I used 3" stiff elastic in lieu of the interfaced inside of the waistband.  This was pretty tricky and made it a real challenge to make any adjustments with I inevitably need to do.  I have found that leaving this very stiff and wide elastic straight on the sides (as a tube) makes the waistband gape a lot at the top.  It was much better after shaping side seams at an angle in the elastic but it still gaped at the middle of the back.  So this time around I cut three pieces of 2" elastic; two for the back and one for the front.  This allowed me to shape the waistband both at the sides and in the middle of the back.  For the fabric part of the waistband I just made a 5 1/4" tube of fabric to encase the elastic, but instead of threading the elastic through I assembled it before attaching it to the pants (last pic).  This worked surprisingly well until I realized I had to unpick it in a couple of places to adjust the elastic (of course).  It turned out these pants fit a little higher on my waist instead of my hips so I had to cut out an inch on each side of the elastic band.  So there's that; next time maybe I will just leave an opening and thread the elastic through.  I did overstich a small bit of the back of the waistband over the elastic to ensure that the elastic doesn't shift inside the fabric and make the shaping wonky.  

All in all I am very happy with how the fit of these turned out.  It turns out I had made the adjustments to the shaping of the back centre seam on the pattern pieces, and I think it fits well across the seat.  I learned a lot of lessons with these pants.  As I often tell my students, it's ok to make mistakes as long as we learn from them.  I'm not sure they are "out and about" worthy because of the twisty look but they definitely taught me a valuable lesson about plaids and confirmed the fit, and they can be worn around the house.  I'm going to call that a win.