Author: Felix

The Great Unicorn Pants Quest – Part 4

The mystery of the back crotch wrinkles, finally solved

By Kitty

In the last instalment of this series a liftetime ago, I field-tested the pants pattern I made from my duct tape shell – and found the same crotch wrinkles in all the test pants that I found in my ready-to-wear pants.

This time, I’m going to fix the problem, and share what I learned about the (extremely common) reason so many people experience this exact same thing.  Even people who have completely different butt and hip shapes from me!

Plodding on along

I won’t lie, the upcoming part was a right old slog. 

So if you’ll recall, I was cutting my pattern out in test fabric, making adjustment after adjustment, and having photos taken from behind me after each alteration (since I had to be standing straight without twisting so as to avoid distorting the fit).  

I pinned, prodded, took in, let out, and ad nauseam.  Poor Felix had to take gazillions of photos, and listen to me say things like “Nooooo!  Why is it doing that all of a sudden?” And “Who needs pants anyway?  I can totally wear skirts when it’s minus 20 degrees out!”  I tried what felt like ALL of the alterations.  And those #$**@!* wrinkles would simply not go away.

I looked through pants fitting guides, I checked out multiple commercial pattern crotches for clues, and I looked up countless photos of other people’s efforts at pants fitting.  That’s when, to my surprise, I discovered that I wasn’t alone in experiencing this particular fit problem. 

The moment of epiphany (in which Aunt Kitty mentions unmentionables)

In fact, loads of ordinary photos posted by normal people for, say, online pattern reviews, quite often showed the same rear crotch wrinkle pattern, to varying extents. 

But these were people with very different body shapes, sizes, and proportions!  Full and flat buttocks, wide and narrow hips, muscular or thin thighs — I couldn’t see a correlation. 

Then something suddenly struck me.  When you look at a normal pants pattern’s front and back pieces next to each other, you can see that they assume that your front and back crotch curves are level with each other and relative to the ground.

I know this is super-confusing, because it requires you to understand negative spaces, which isn’t intuitive to most of us.  Take a look at the drawing below:

This shows the back and front crotch curves of the pants pattern, and the spaces where your body parts are supposed to go (your pubis in the front and your buttocks in the back, labelled in red).  The blue line shows you that the bottom curves of the front and back crotch are more or less level with each other on this imaginary pattern. But this is NOT how loads of people are built!

Now, try this with me, even though it’s going to sounds pretty weird: cup your left hand over the bottom curve of your butt, and your right hand in front over where your pubis starts to curve out from your body.  Then look in a mirror sideways, and check if one hand is significantly lower (closer to the ground) relative to the other. 

No, I’m not showing a picture of this, because we’re keeping this family-friendly.  We’re trying to find the body parts that correspond to the pink arrows in the drawing below:

Scoop out roughly at the purple line if your butt sits lower than your pubis.

If you’re anything like me, you left hand is noticeably lower than your right.  In other words, the bottom of your buttock curve sits lower on your body than the corresponding front curve of your crotch. 

This is sometimes called “low buttocks” in pattern adjustment guides, and can be due to lots of different things, such as the action of gravity on a large tush or (as in my case) the tilt angle of the pelvis.  It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the shape, size, width, or protrusion of your bum.

I’ve since learned that this is pretty common, which is why I saw those same rear crotch wrinkles I had on so many other people, who otherwise looked nothing like me in the butt department.  Turns out it’s not due to the strange shape or flatness of my rear end after all! 

So how do we fix it?

Fix the pants pattern, I mean, not my butt or yours.  Remember, Kittens, clothes should always fit you, not the other way around.

Well, since pretty much every pants pattern ever (or at least the two dozen or so I looked at) are drafted so the front and back crotch curves level, you’re going to have to alter them.  Even if you made the pattern by duct-taping yourself, you may still need to do this, if you saw wrinkles similar to mine.

I just started by scooping out the bottom of my back crotch curve.  The purple line at on the drawing below shows you roughly where to scoop, but you’ll have to experiment to find exactly where and how much on yourself. 

I started out by scooping out only a very small amount (around ¼ in), tried on the muslin, had Felix take a photo, looked at the result, and kept on scooping more — until, magically, the wrinkles disappeared!

Can it be?  Are the wrinkles gone?

A happy ending

Note: I will be mostly showing the rear view in the following photos, since the front of all of these pants looked fine.  I made them all in the same fabric so we’d be comparing apples to apples.  You can ignore any various pocket and hem finish details, since they don’t affect the fit at all; I just wanted to make all of these wearable, so I could donate them to charity when I was finished.

So, in summary, we started out with a pair of pants, based on a pattern custom-drafted to my measurements following a standard pattern-making formula. 

The original “custom” pants that started me down this rabbit hole. 
Still looks awful.

The first pants based on my duct tape shell had a seam down the middle back leg, and looked somewhat better, though far from perfect.  Problematically, however, they didn’t have enough ease for me to move comfortably.

Two-piece back pants from the duct tape sloper

Next was the pair made from my revised pattern, now with more ease and a one-piece back.  Again, worlds better than my original pants, but still not perfect.  This was when the front and back crotch curves were still level with one another.

One-piece back pants, with the crotch curves still level at front and back

And finally, FINALLY, here are the pants I made after I finished scooping out my back crotch to make it significantly lower than the front (by nearly an inch, in my case, which is a lot in pattern-making terms).

The angels sang, the sky was full of puppies, and there was much rejoicing.

The perfect pants, and where to go from here

Now that I’m in the elite club for people whose pants fit, what am I going to do?

For one thing, I need to go through my entire wardrobe, and replace every single pair of pants I own.  Not just because the new ones will look so much better (though they will!).  But because they will be so, so, SO much more comfortable and practical.  Here’s why.

As it turns out, the same body features that caused those wrinkles, my “low buttocks,” were also forcing me to yank up my pants about a hundred times throughout the day. 

Basically, the wrinkles were symptoms telling me that there wasn’t enough negative space in the bottom back crotch area.  Meaning my bum was constantly “stealing” fabric from higher up to create enough space for itself lower down, making my back waistband pull down. 

Once I “scooped out” enough space, the problem went away — and now pants waistband pretty much stays where I put it, even when I bend over.  I had no idea how annoying it was to have to constantly hike up my pants, until I didn’t have to anymore.  It actually changed my world. 

What you can do with your new pants pattern

Your new pants pattern can be used for all sorts of additions to your future wardrobe, and not just for sewing this one pattern. 

I hacked mine into overalls by adding a bib:

I’m planning on mashing it together with my perfected T-shirt pattern to make a knit jumpsuit, and widening the legs for pyjamas and summer palazzo pants.  I’ll also be able to use it to alter any and all future pants patterns I make or buy by using its crotch curve as a reference.

I already made a pair of fully fleece-lined pants for freezing days, narrowing the legs a bit for extra wind exclusion.  I wanted to see how this would turn out, because heavyweight pants are, well, heavier, meaning I’ve always had a huge problem with them falling down in the past.  And like magic, these stayed up just fine!  Here they are:

Mmmmm. So cozy.

In Conclusion

And that brings us to the long-delayed end of the pants-fitting saga. 

If you don’t know, I decided to join the 21st century at last and learn how to use things like a laptop, email, and social media in February of this year.  It was one heck of a learning curve, and I haven’t had time for much else since!

This may be the last blog here for a little while.  Once I’ve dealt with the urgent business of creating an “online presence” (my new phrase of the year) for Felix & Kitty, my intention is to start a dedicated blogging site where I can write more useful posts – like step-by-step sew-alongs and hands-on tutorials for DIY projects.

Until then, thank you for those of you who are still hanging in with me, and hope to see you soon!

The Great Unicorn Pants Quest – Part 2

Making the Pattern

By Kitty

Last time, after being wrapped from the waist down in duct tape, I ended up with this:

Now, I just had to turn all this into a viable pants pattern.  Sounds simple enough, until you take a closer look at what I had to work with.

A caveat before proceeding

If you’re not familiar with pattern-making or -testing, please be advised that what I am about to do is NOT the conventional or accepted way to make/test patterns.  I wouldn’t blame classically trained pattern-makers if they wanted to burn me for heresy.  In fact, I myself would never do it this way when I make patterns for my designs.

I’m just sharing what I did this one time, because (spoilers for the next instalment of the series!), after much howling and tearing of hair, it actually worked in the end.  No guarantees that it will do the same for anyone else, but I have the first pair of pants in twenty-plus years of sewing that really, properly fit me.   Maybe seeing the process will be worth something to someone sometime.

If you’re also on this quest

If you’re doing this with me, you will need the following before you continue:

  • A lot of paper.  I used a big roll of brown paper from Staples, but you can also use newspaper or any spare wrapping paper you have lying around.  If necessary, you can even tape together regular old printer paper.  Make sure that it’s big enough to hold your entire duct tape shell with room to spare all around.  If your paper has folds or wrinkles, press it flat with an iron.
  • A pencil or pen, scotch tape, and some sharpies, a ruler, and some scissors you don’t mind using on paper.  Don’t use your good dress-making shears on paper, as they’ll dull in no time.
  • Weights for holding down your pattern pieces so they don’t shift during tracing.  Tinned cat food or tuna works fine if you don’t own pattern weights.
  • Some basic experience working with sewing patterns.  Intermediate skills like truing seams and moving darts would be handy, but not absolutely essential, since these are things you can look up online.  Video tutorials exist for everything these days!
  • And of course, your duct tape shell.

Cutting up your duct tape shell

In theory, you can cut apart your duct tape shell however you like.  But for the purpose of making a standard slacks-type pattern, you’ll want to cut it along the side seam and inseam lines you marked while the shell was still on your body.  

I’d show you what mine looked like at this point, but it would just be confusing, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.  So refer to my squiggly drawing instead; you will end up with a front piece and a back piece, which should look like some variation on these basic shapes:

The cut edges of your shell may look even more wobbly than my drawings; that’s totally fine.

Don’t worry if none of the lines look neat or straight.  Depending on your own body shape, the front and back may look quite uneven, and the leg width may not look balanced at all.  

Unless you have an extremely strange body, the duct tape shell will NOT want to lie flat, which makes total sense.  Your lower body is a whole collection of very 3-dimensional shapes, all of which will translate into a bump in your shell.  Your buttocks, your calves, your abdomen, and any in-and-out bits will all become hills and valleys, which may seem impossible to fully flatten out.

You’ll need to make some cuts into your shell to help with the tracing.  To flatten the buttock area, draw a line (use a ruler if you need to) from the top of the back waist line pointing to the fullest point of your butt, which you marked during the taping process.  Carefully cut on the line up to, but not past, the full butt point.  A dart will open up along the cut, and you should be able to get the butt area to lie (fairly) flat:

If you have a rounded tummy, you can do the same thing in the front — just rule a line from the top front waist line pointing to where the bump looks biggest and cut to open a “dart.”

Unless you have really large calves and small ankles, you shouldn’t need to cut into the lower leg area at all.  After all, we’re making a slacks pattern, and it won’t be very fitted around the calves anyway.  But if, like me, you have very large calves and very narrow ankles, you may need to make a vertical cut down the centre of the calf area.  My calf looked like this uncut:

What happens if you have big calves and tiny ankles

It was just too much, so I had to make the cut just to make the duct tape manageable in this area.

The calf area lying flat(ish) after cutting

After I sliced into the calf, I wound up continuing the cut upward, entirely cutting the back half of my shell into two parts, a centre back and a side back.  I did this because I could not for the life of me figure out how to keep it in one piece and make it behave anything like a pants back pattern (this is why I didn’t want to use my back piece as a sample earlier!)  You can see what I mean here:

So how the $#*% do I mash these two parts together?

I would just have to deal with the two-piece back later in the process.  With luck, yours does not look like this, and you can proceed with the tracing.

Tracing your duct tape shell onto paper

Begin by laying one of your duct tape shell halves on your paper, tape side up.  Make sure you have at least a couple of inches extra paper all around.  Place your weights on it to keep it from shifting as you work.

Trying to keep the duct tape as flat as you reasonably can, trace around the edges.  Keep the pen or pencil perpendicular to the cut edge of the tape; don’t let the tip of your pen go under it, or it will change the size.  You won’t be able to keep it entirely flat, so don’t try.  But at least try to get an accurate flat tracing of the crotch curve.

When you’re done, add around ¾ inch around all the edges except the top and bottom.  This is so you have a little wearing ease plus a seam allowance for when you test the pattern.  I recommend adding at least 1 inch to the top edge, and none to the bottom hem for the moment; this will make life a bit easier during the test fitting stage later on.  You can always add more or less according to your preferences.  It should look something like this:

Allowances added to tracing

It’s obviously easier to add the allowances after removing the duct tape shell from the paper; I left it on in the photo only so you can see what it looks like after the addition.  I’m also showing my side back piece (remember, I divided my back half into two pieces), so don’t worry if your (single-piece back) pattern piece doesn’t look anything like mine.

Since I was making a slacks pattern, not super-skinny pants, I straightened out the leg shape from the knee down, rather than follow the duct tape.  The legs look flared in the photo because I need to accommodate my super-prominent calves; yours will likely look more straight up and down.

Straightening the lower leg for a slacks pattern

I then repeated the tracing with my front piece, which looks more “normal” than my back.  Yours shouldn’t look too different from this, though you may have a dart if your abdomen is more rounded than mine.  I moved the duct tape shell away from the traced front crotch line so you can see it better:

Making the edges match up

Cut out both your front and back tracings.  Now, compare the length of your front and back side seams by putting one piece over the other and “walking” your way along the entire length of the seam.  If they don’t match, trim the longer piece or add to the shorter piece by taping on a sliver of paper, whichever seems to look better to you.  Repeat with the front/back inseams.

The grainlines

This is a deceptively important part of this whole process.  On each of your pattern pieces, mark a line which would have been exactly perpendicular to the floor when the duct tape was still on your body.  

Hopefully this was one of the markings you made during the taping process.  Any line you marked along a dropped plumb bob or straight edge going up and down (you’ll have done this at least for the side seams and maybe inseams) will do as a grainline reference.  Just draw a line parallel to that line on each pattern piece.

Good enough for now!  It’s time to test the pattern in fabric.

Another caveat, and a prescription for patience

Remember, these are very crude pseudo-pattern pieces at this point.  It’s way too soon to start worrying about nailing the pants length or making sure the pattern hem is level.  Just try to make sure that the bits that will be sewn together more or less match.

FYI, it’s perishingly unlikely that you’ll end up with a decent-fitting pair of wearable pants the first time you cut and sew this pattern (one professional pattern fitter once told me that she often goes through ten test patterns per client to obtain a perfectly-fitted pair of pants).  I certainly didn’t, not the first time, nor the second, nor the third or fourth.  If you do, you are obviously not of the mortal plane, and probably have unicorns grazing on your lawn.

Next time, join me as I:

  • Actually make pants from my pattern
  • Completely scrap and rejig my original pattern lines
  • Test the revised pattern, then make alterations, then test again
  • Rinse and repeat, again and again and again, ad nauseam

…until finally, I make a pair of pants that really, properly fits me!  

The Great Unicorn Pants Quest – Part 1

The duct tape sloper

By Kitty

Kitty solves all her problems with duct tape

Last time, I learned that all my pants (1) don’t fit and (2) make my backside look like squashed peaches in a paper sack.  

Bad Backside Fit

After exhausting the usual methods to try and fix the problem (ready-to-wear, altering commercial patterns, mathematical pattern drafting, virgin sacrifices, and so forth), I decided that duct tape is once again my best friend.  Felix would cover me in tape from the waist down, and I would use the resulting shell to create a sloper for all my future pants.

The duct tape sloper

If you’re wondering, a sloper is a very basic pattern based entirely on your body shape and measurements (without any design ease or features) that you can use to create other styles that fit.  

At Felix & Kitty, we’ve always used the duct tape method to make custom corset patterns for complicated bodies, including mine.  Plus I’ve already made a T-shirt sloper for myself using this method. So Felix is an old hand at taping the female torso, and I assumed it would be pretty simple to do the same thing for pants.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Preparing to tape

If you’re doing this with us, You want to make sure that you haven’t just eaten a big meal, and that you’ve used the bathroom before you start.  Trust me, there’s no quick way out of the duct tape once you’ve started. 

We usually use a disposable T-shirt as the base layer for taping the upper body.  For taping the legs and hips, I ran up some leggings out of scrap knit material.  It’s some kind of thin, hideous, stained polyester knit I kept for testing patterns.  Since we’d just be cutting it up, I didn’t want to use anything nice.  Nor did I bother finishing any of the raw edges.

Sacrificial Leggings

If you don’t have any sacrificial leggings, you can use plastic wrap as a base layer.  Simply wrap your lower body with it, being very careful not to pull it too tight or cut off your circulation in any way.  Or you could use a large lawn bag, cutting it up the middle and taping it to more or less conform to your legs.  Anything will do, as long as it’s not so thick that it will throw off the fit or so loose that it will bunch up under the tape. 

Have a long ruler or other straight edge on hand, as well as a few sharpies, maybe in different colours.  A plumb bob could be useful if you’re not good at judging what “perpendicular to the ground” looks like.   You can improvise one by tying any weight to the end of a shoelace or string; a key ring works well.  Or an L-shaped ruler will do the job too.  Some extra string or long shoelaces are nice to have as well.  And of course, duct tape.

The taping process  

To wrap the legs, the wrapper can’t just walk around and around the wrap-ee the way you do with the torso.  Also, you don’t want to risk significant compression in the groin-adjacent area by pulling against the inner thighs, partly because it would distort the fit but also because you really don’t want to compromise blood flow in this region. 

That meant I did NOT want long pieces wrapped like doughnuts around the upper legs.  But we really had no experience of what the best method would be.  In the end, being the anatomy nerd that I am, I decided that we should follow the major leg muscle groups with the duct tape, which worked pretty well.  

The crotch proved the tricky bit, since you need to try and maintain the same posture throughout while making room for the person doing the taping to get in there.  You will need the tape to go pretty much all the way up and cover everywhere with no bare fabric/plastic wrap showing.  Using narrower, shorter strips of tape helps. 

However you do it, it’s going to get quite intimate, so your wrapper had better be someone you’re comfortable with rummaging around your privates.  While they’re working, remember not to suck in your gut or stand unnaturally erect, or you’ll get an inaccurate fit.

We covered the entire relevant area (from the high waist to above the ankle) with one or two layers of duct tape, then finished with a single-layer “skin” of duct tape, off-set from the “muscle” layer for reinforcement against separation.  You don’t want any more layers than this, since too much thickness will make it hard to flatten the taped form for pattern-making later.  It looked like this when we finished taping:

Duct Tape “skin” Before Marking

The duct tape needs to cover a little more area at the waist level than your finished pants will, so you can draw on it.  We decided to tape all the way down to the ankle because I have extremely prominent calves from strength training and the way I stand with my knees locked, which I thought might have a carry-over effect on the fit higher up (this turned out to be an excellent call, as you’ll see later).  If you have normal calves, you can probably get away with just taping to the knees.

Quad-to-Calf Curvature

We chose to wrap only one leg because my legs aren’t noticeably asymmetrical.  If your legs are very different left to right, or if you just want a spare half shell to use in case you mess up with the first side, by all means wrap both sides.  

Either way, I recommend that you wrap all the way around the hips and abdomen; if you try to do only one half, things may be pulled off centre by the taping process.  

Marking the side seams

The next step was to carefully mark all the important reference lines, plus some I thought might possibly be useful.  The first one was the side seam, which should have been the most straightforward.

The side seam should run perpendicular to the floor from your waist to the hem at (surprise!) the sides.  It should bisect your body and legs, or divide them evenly, front to back.  In an average person, if you draw a straight line downward from the midpoint of your hips at the side, it also more or less divides your legs into front and back halves — think where the side seam of your pants fall when you’re wearing them.

Depending on your posture, you may find that this line does NOT hit the midpoint of your legs.  In which case, just do your best to imagine where you’d want your pants side seam to be and draw a straight line downward at that point.

In my case, it was a whole lot more complicated than that.  It turns out that when I stand normally, my calves are thrust so far back that a straight line going down the middle of my side hip wouldn’t even BE on my lower legs:

Er… where am I supposed to put my side seam line now?

This was patently ridiculous.  I couldn’t put my side seam anywhere close to the mid-hip without going off my legs completely.  Since I had no clue how to deal with this, I asked Felix to mark several potential “side” seam lines, as well as a line down to centre front and centre back leg.  I’d just have to sort it out later in the pattern-making process.

Marking the other lines and points

The other reference lines were considerably less eventful.  We managed to get the following drawn on without too much kerfuffle: 

  1. The centre front/crotch curve/centre back line, which is exactly what it sounds like.  You start at the middle of your tummy area (about belly button level, where your jeans fly would be) and go straight down, between your legs and up the back.  It may help to pass a string between your legs and hold it taut in place (centred at front and back) while your helper draws the line by following the string.
  2. Your preferred waistband position.  Just draw on the duct tape where you’d like the top edge of your pants to sit.  If it helps, tie a string around your waist at the desired location first.
(2) Waistline Marked (top of image)

We also marked the fullest point of my gluteus maximus, the big butt muscle.  If, unlike me, you actually own real buttocks, this is where the back darts will point on your pants.  I asked for a vertical line down the centre back of my leg that passes over this point, which will be useful later if I want to make pants that cup snugly under my bum.  

For all of the above lines, we marked several cross-hatch points to make matching easier (if/when the shell gets cut apart into panels during pattern-making).  We also labelled the front, back, and sides, because once the shell is off your body, it’s going to look like a mess of shed snakeskin, and it can be hard to tell which way is which.  

If you can think of any other possible points or lines, go ahead and mark them.  If you don’t need them later, no harm done, and you never know which one might prove useful.

Finally,  we marked the horizontal circumference line above my knees as a future reference point.  For some people with prominent calves like me, the back pants leg below the knee may need to be longer than the front, for the same reason that the front of a shirt needs to be longer than the back in large-busted women — you need more length to go over a taller “bump,” as I explain in more details here. So I reasoned that it might be handy to know where to start adding length later.

Horizontal Knee Line

Escaping the tape

When I had checked and double-checked that we had made all the markings I could think of, Felix (very gingerly) cut me out of my duct tape shell, being extra careful not to slice through my underwear or my skin.  If you’re not experienced at using shears, blunt-tipped scissors are probably your safest bet.  It may be easier to cut from the top down part of the way, then go from the bottom up until the cut meets in the middle.

In my case, I needed the full length of the leg cut open because I have massive weight-lifter quadriceps, which meant my leg would’t easily come out through the top opening alone.  If you have thin or less muscular legs, you might find it easier to cut the shell along the centre front or back by sucking in your tummy to make a nice hollow for the scissors, and take them off the way you take off a pair of jeans.

Either way, the thing to remember is not to pull on or distort the tape shell any more than absolutely necessary while you wiggle yourself out. 

Now what?

Now you have a duct tape double of your waist, hips, and leg.  

You can’t just use this as a pattern for pants, of course, unless you use an extremely stretchy fabric and want skin-tight leggings.  If you’re like me, you can’t use it as a pattern at all, because it simply won’t lie flat.  Also, this looks nothing like any pants pattern anyone sane could ever imagine.

The peeled shell

Look at the taped shell of my calf.  You could hide a watermelon under there!

Is there a watermelon underneath?

I can hardly believe this is for real.  I’m very, very glad we decided not to quit taping at the knees, because if we had, I never would have learned how bonkers my lower legs and calves really are.  

Having seen this, I think that my pants fit problems weren’t due entirely to the shape of my bum.  Quite a lot of it MUST be due to the peculiar angle of my legs and my knees-locked posture, which seriously accentuate my already uber-muscular calves.  

On the one hand, I’m a little dismayed at how abnormal my body is.  But on the other hand, I feel better about failing so utterly at getting a conventional pattern to fit me!  At least now I know nothing off the rack, whether ready-to-wear or in sewing pattern form, ever stood a whelk’s chance in hell of fitting me.

Next time on the quest for unicorn pants

In the next instalment of the pants fitting adventure, I will attempt to make some kind of sense out of my duct tape shell and turn it into a usable flat pattern.  Truthfully, I have no idea exactly how that’s going to happen, because it bears no relationship to the shape of any pants pattern I have ever seen in my life.  But it will be exciting to try.

If you too have never found a pair of pants that fit exactly as you wanted, I highly recommend giving the duct taping process a go.  Even if you don’t make your own pattern or sew your own pants, you WILL learn loads of things about your body — and demystify some of the things that makes you so uniquely you.

Moving forward by looking behind

Literally.  No, really actually literally.

By Kitty

When we used to do conventions (remember those?), I occasionally saw T-shirts that read “People who misuse the word ‘literally’ figuratively drive me insane.”  

As a word pedant, I quite understand the sentiment.  So in this spirit, I’m going forward with my first personal project of the new year by (literally) looking behind me.  At my backside, to be specific.

Warning: if you don’t feel like looking at lots of scary photos of my mono-butt in badly fitted pants, maybe skip this one.  

You Have Been Warned

Why the sudden interest in bums?

I’ve been sewing for myself since (figuratively) the first ice age.  But most of that time, I’ve focused almost entirely on fitting my outsize bosom and not at all on the other half.  

As anyone who’s seen me knows, I was standing at the front when they were handing out busts, and forgot to show up for the booty line.  A year ago, you’d have needed a microscope to find my behind.  Now, with my pandemic-induced, year-long bout of weight lifting, my buttocks actually exist!  They’re a sad, if valiant, effort at actual curves, but at least they’re trying.

And none of my pants fit anymore.  Only then, it occurred to me that I’ve never really thought about anything I wear on my lower body.  Even my Felix & Kitty design line, which contains a slew of jackets, vests, coats, tops, shrugs, skirts, and cloaks, doesn’t contain ANY pants.  Woof.  Did it really take me ten years as a professional clothing designer to notice that?

What are “pants,” exactly?

First off, if you speak British English, I mean trousers, not underwear.  When I was growing up, “pants” were what Americans and Canadians would call “panties.”  Over 25 years after landing in North America, I still giggle internally when I use the word “pants” to mean lower body outer garments with a division for each leg.

I can’t say “trousers,” though, because here in Canada, that means a specific style of pants.  There aren’t set definitions, but trousers are generally dressier, looser-fitting pants that don’t cup under the buttocks at all, and have wider legs.

For todays purposes, I will be using the word “pants” to mean something like “slacks.”  These are pants that fit fairly snugly over the hips, cup under the buttocks noticeably but aren’t skintight, and have narrower but still fairly straight legs.  Basically, something halfway between trousers (in the North American sense) and jeans.  You know, the kind of thing you could wear to pop out to the shops or for work in a semi-formal office and look respectable, while still feeling comfy if you’re just lounging at home.

Do you know if your pants fit?

Well, looking around, I’d say that most of us (myself included) really don’t.  If you don’t believe me, try this little experiment with me:

  1. Put on a pair of your regular pants.  Avoid anything super-tight or stretchy, like skinny jeans, leggings, or snug yoga pants, because that doesn’t tell you anything about bum fit.  Also avoid anything really loose, like palazzo pants or culottes, for the same reason.  Just plain old semi-fitted slacks.
  2. Stand normally without twisting or looking behind you, and have someone take a few pictures of your lower rear view.  Make sure they get some close-up of the buttocks and upper thighs.  This will NOT give you the same view as just looking at your bum in a mirror.  Trust me on this!  All these years, I looked behind me in the mirror and thought my pants fit fine (just see how wrong I turned out to be in the photos below).
  3. Now google some pictures of “how pants should fit in the back,” or some variation thereof.  This is probably the best way to find photos of real people with real bodies in properly fitted pants.  Don’t bother with fashion photos, which are generally retouched to remove all shadows and lines, and are in NO way representative of how real clothes should fit.
  4. Compare (2) and (3).  If they’re more or less similar, lucky you.  For the rest of us, what we see will come as a bit of a shock.  Take a deep breath and remind yourself that self-knowledge is always worth having.

I accidentally performed this “experiment” while trying to figure out why the back of *all* my pants kept pulling down when I bent over or sat down.  I asked Felix to take rear view photos of a pair of my most recently made pants, and received a nasty shock when I saw that they looked like this (if you’re the sensitive sort, you might want to cover your eyes):

Experimental Results

Blurgh.  I’m pretty darn picky about the fit of my clothes these days, what with being a seamstress and all, but I’d never before thought to do this.  I always thought my pants back looked fine when I glanced behind myself in the mirror!  Is this only happening to me, or did anyone else have the same revelation?

How are pants supposed to fit?

From a practical standpoint, your pants should feel secure around your waist and stay in place with normal movement though your entire day, but never feel uncomfortably tight, even when you sit or bend over.  You should not need to hike them up constantly; nor should they ride up between your buttocks and give you a wedgie.  The pants legs should not get caught up on your calves.  The waistband shouldn’t roll or pull down.  Basically, you should never notice them at all.

From an appearance standpoint, the front should have no significant wrinkles or drag lines when you’re standing still, and there shouldn’t be any excess fabric or pulling.  There should be no evidence of the dreaded “camel toe” at the front crotch area (look this up!).  The front of these pants — the same pair as the one above, with the terrible back view — actually fit pretty well:

The Front is Good

Depending on the design and fabric, the back may need to have some drape lines for ease, or you might not be able to walk or raise your legs.  But you shouldn’t see major wrinkles, “cat whiskers,” or visible wedgies.  In a perfect world, the back of your pants falls almost as smoothly as the front, but you still have full mobility.  In other words, NOT like this:

How to get pants that fit

I tried it the usual way.  I took careful measurements, chose the right size pants pattern, altered it meticulously so all the numbers matched me, and sewed it up.  Then I tried again with a different pattern from another pattern company.  Then I tried drafting my own pattern from my measurements.  This is what resulted:

I tried commercial pants off the rack, which felt like they fit, more or less, from different brands.  They looked like this:

Note that while all of these look awful, they also look broadly similar to each other, in spite of the fact that each design comes from an entirely different maker and has different details and levels of tightness.  In other words, the wrinkles and drag lines are consistent between all the brands and styles.

This tells me that something about the way I’m built is causing this fit problem, rather than a problematic draft by a particular company or designer.  I always knew I had non-standard breasts, but apparently I also have a statistically abnormal behind.  

After many, many attempts at fixing the issue, all of which failed abjectly, I finally decided to do what I should have done in the first place.

When in doubt, duct tape

Yes, I turned to my trusty old friend, duct tape.  So next time, I’ll go into some detail on how Felix wrapped my legs, bum, and intimates in duct tape to create a custom pants pattern.  

This will be Step 1 in the great unicorn pants project, in which your elderly great-aunt Kitty, who used to think she was a highly experienced designer and seamstress, quests for her first-ever pair of properly fitted pants.  Well, they say humility is good for the soul!

An invitation

If you also found the back view of your pants disconcerting (or if you have to hike up/pull down/fiddle with them throughout the day, or they keep trying to crawl up your butt crack or between your legs, or give you muffin tops where you have none), I encourage you to join me on my little quest.

Even if you’re not big on sewing, you’ll learn something about the shape and posture of your own body, and gain an important tool you can use to improve the fit and comfort of your next pair of pants.  Since most of us live in pants these days, surely that’s a tool worth having.

2020 is behind us!

(Am I the only one that has mixed feelings about this?)

By Kitty

Well, that was…different.  

Most of us have some choice things to say on the subject of the year 2020, many of which are not fit to print.  Everyone experienced drastic changes.  Lives, jobs, and sanity were lost, the world became an utterly different shape, and the weirdness is far from over.

But still….

In some ways, it was a pretty good year in Kittyland.  That seems like 1) an awful thing to say, given the terrible things that have happened to so many people, and 2) a very strange thing to say, since I lost pretty much my entire income and became professionally unemployed.

Obviously, I’m not saying it was a good thing that the world went barking mad, or that the consequences of the pandemic (and everything it unearthed about what’s wrong with society) are anything but horrifying.  

I’m speaking purely from a personal philosophical place.  This is the year I spent sewing what feels like (and probably actually was) thousands of face masks, half of which were donated to essential workers and assorted shelters.  The year I found out that making money can be less important than making a difference.  The year where we grew tomatoes and squash and beans instead of our business, and learned that produce is easier to share than products.

When or if it becomes safe to have conventions again, we’ll no doubt return to the making and peddling of fancy dress.  But a part of me will remember with fondness a year in which my sewing skills and materials went toward making the world a little safer, not just prettier.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere, and I hope I’ll remember to take it with me when life approaches normal one day.

For a while there, it did feel as though I was playing hooky if I wasn’t spending every minute of the day churning out masks.  Now that mass production seems to have caught up with the demand for masks and vaccines are a real thing, I feel like we can indulge in a spot of frivolity.    

So here are some things I hope to write about in the near and intermediate future:

  • Bums.  Not the kind of bums that involve unemployment, but the kind you sit on.  I have gone on at some length in the past about the trials and tribulations of owning a non-standard bosom, and how to get clothes to fit around it (here, for instance).  Now I mean to branch out into the other curvy bit that can often be stroppy on a woman.  Even into the dreaded realm of pants fitting.
  • Feet.  More specifically, the atrocious things you might be doing to yours without even knowing, and what you can do about it.  The majority of foot problems are self-inflicted!
  • DIY tutorials.  One of the things I’ve learned last year is that we all could stand to be a bit more self-sufficient.  This is probably true even when the world isn’t going to pot, right?  Instead of just talking about things I’ve made, I mean to start showing you how to make them yourself, if you’re so inclined.  Maybe starting with a simple, no-fitting-required sewing project, progressing on to a T-shirt that actually fits your DDD cups and/or spectacular booty, and perhaps even going all the way to basic corsetry, if I don’t get lost in my garden first.  

Until next time, Kittens, stay safe and enjoy the fresh, crisp new year!