Jalie 2908 Jeans...The Encore!

Jeans!  The second version of Jalie 2908 is done!  This time I used brown denim with no stretch.

There were a few changes/tweaks from my first pair that I made to this version.  Keep in mind that my first pair had 3% lycra and this pair has 0%.  The back yoke as drafted gaped like crazy on the first pair and I wound up taking 2 darts in it after it was stitched (and top-stitched) to the back. I redrafted the yoke making it shorter, narrower and having more curvature.  The revised yoke was much better than the original, which is good news.  There are still some weird wrinkles in it, as you can see above, which don't bother me too much.  The bad news is that I made the yoke too narrow (vertically) which shortened the back crotch length too much and the waistband pulls down when I sit.  Aaack!!  

Since there was no stretch in the fabric, I cut the waistband on the bias as the pattern states.  I will NOT do this again!!  The waistband gaped even though the yoke didn't.  Aack!  I'm pulling on the waistband in this photo, so it's not nearly so extreme in real life, but still...

Waistband gap

Rather than suffering with a gapping waistband,  I thought "Hey--you made these, you can make them better!"  So I pulled out my seam ripper and some elastic and got to work.

I undid the top-stitching on the outside of the 2nd set of belt loops on the back as seen here:

 I threaded the elastic through the waistband and sewed one end directly under the belt loops so that the belt loops would hide my stitching.  So sneaky!!  My thread was a pretty perfect match so it wouldn't be seen in any case, but it's always good to be sneaky anyway.  :)

Then I pulled the elastic in to close up the gaposis, pinned the elastic in place and sewed the other end right under the belt loop.  So this is how they look now:

Elastic inserted

The gap is gone!  Yay!  But the waistband still pulls down when I sit...Boo!  So I will re-re-draft the yoke keeping the full height at the center back.

In case you were wondering about my back pockets, I used a gadget I have owned for a while but have never used before now.  It's a tracing wheel with transfer paper.  I drew my pocket design on tracing paper and outlined the pocket itself.  Then I traced the pattern onto the pattern piece onto one pocket.  Then I flipped the tracing paper over, and traced the mirrored pattern onto the other pocket.  For this pair, my top-stitching tread was such a perfect match for the fabric, it was hard to see the top-stitching.  After a little online ordering 'oops', I bought the Gutermann 700 thread color chart from wawak.com, so that I could perfectly match my thread.  So for this pocket design, I did one line with a very narrow zig-zag stitch with a short stitch length and the other (upper) line, I did 2 rows of straight stitching side by side.

On my first version, there was too much fabric between the waist and the high hip which created wrinkles.  I took a small wedge out of the pattern which took care of those wrinkles beautifully!  

So what have I learned based on these 2 versions of jeans made with 2 very different fabrics?  

1. I love making jeans
2. I love wearing jeans that I have made
3. What fits perfectly with 3% stretch will be too tight with 0%  (I had to release the lower thigh above my knee on the 2nd pair, giving myself about 1/4"-3/8" more room there)
4. I will NOT cut the waistband on the bias ever again.
5. I need a little bit of stretch in my denim: no stretch is not enough. 
6. I will be making a 3rd version very soon

Oh yeah...in that photo on the right...I made that ivory Refrew too.  It needs some tweaks (too wide across the upper chest), but I needed a quick fix.

Today is also the last day of voting for the Pattern Review Lined Jacket Contest.  Go Vote!!