One of my dearest friends was concerned about the effects of
grass on my brilliant yellow fighting pants when we moved practices outside again, so I've finally made the second pair of poofy pants.
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| These pants are as wide as two break room tables. I am about half a break room table wide. |
Same pattern as the earlier pair, with a few modifications. I still used 54-inch panels for each leg, with a roughly 15x9-inch diamond for the gusset, set with the long points running into the legs. All French seams this time—mostly because I didn't feel like pinning the seam allowances for flat felling.
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| Four-to-one is about as high a ratio as I'd like to deal with, unless I were using fine silk. |
The method I've landed on for dealing with narrow cuffs on very wide-legged pants is to make two layers of overlapping box pleats. I don't love gathering, and for seams that are likely to bear some strain, I'd rather be able to do a nice firm stab stitch and know it had caught plenty of the fabric. So, the first step is to pin the leg into the cuff at intervals—I start with the quarters, because they're easy to find, then halve them, then halve each of
those sections again, leaving me with 16 divisions.
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| Half the box pleats pinned. |
Next, pin alternate sections into box pleats that run right up to each other, pinching the remaining sections at the base.
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| All pleats pinned. (I don't know what's happening with the color in this photo, but the cloth is not remotely grey.) |
Pin down the remaining sections in box pleats that overlap the existing pleats completely, making the whole cuff about five layers thick all the way around. (
Oh, my aching fingers.)
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| Stab stitching the cuff again, from the outside. |
Theoretically I could just as well get the cuff folded over and pinned so I could do one pass of stab stitch, but I'm still over-engineering fighting clothes for fear that a seam will tear out on me, so I do one pass to anchor the pleats and another to finish the cuff and create the drawstring channel. It typically takes about an hour per cuff, if I don't get distracted too much.
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| Nice even stitches to anchor the waistband. And at last, a color-accurate photo! |
For these pants, instead of the folded over waistband I did on the yellow ones, which works but requires me to readjust the gathers every time I wear them, I made a separate waistband, finishing the short edges before stitching it on.
I pinned the quarters like for the cuffs, then started pleating from the center back and center front toward the sides, where I placed just one inverted box pleat. This brings the bulk of the fabric to the center of the garment, which may or may not make a difference. I think it looks nice, and the pleating into the waistband reduces the bulk tremendously.
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| pleasedon'tkillme, pleasedon'tkillme |
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| Also I wear leg armour over my pants right now, so the poof is a bit tamed. |
I still have no photos of me
in the pants without a lot of armour and caftan obscuring them, but these show a little bit.
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