So after the smashing success of our efforts towards our pillows, we moved on to the second project for our Beginner’s Sewing Class: yoga pants.
Actually, it was yoga pants for the ladies in our class. Being the only guy in our class, our instructor didn’t think that yoga pants would be up my alley. So she gave me some options to choose from: a shirt,
pajama bottoms,
or a pair of dance pants.
Well, I wasn’t interested in making a shirt, and I couldn’t understand, if she thought that yoga pants wouldn’t be appropriate for me, how she figured dance pants would be any better. But I did need a new pair of pajama bottoms anyways so I decided on the second option.
The objective of this particular project was to get us working with a stretch material as it poses challenges that one wouldn’t encounter with regular fabrics; I decided on a dark blue.
Yes, boring, I know; but it’s my favourite colour.
I quickly got through the steps of cutting my pattern to the right size, then pinning it to my fabric and cutting around to get the two legs.
I then sewed the crotches together followed by the side seams to get the basic shape of the pants put together. It was pretty smooth sailing up until this point.
The next step was now to attach the elastic in order to make the waistband.
This was a little tricky as you have to ensure that when you’re sewing the elastic around the circumference of the pant waist that it’s done in an even fashion. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with pants all scrunched up in one part of the waist and smoothed out in others. And nobody wants that.
This meant that, as you sewed on the elastic, you had to stretch the elastic and fabric out to the same length so that the fabric was distributed evenly on to the elastic.
So the trick was to divide the pant waist into quarters, do the same with the elastic, and then line up and pin together the dividing lines. That way, you could stretch out the pant and elastic out in more manageable sections and be assured that you’re stretching the two materials evenly and uniformly around the circumference of the waist.
The elastic was then rolled over, pinned and stitched again to get a clean finish.
Ah, Strongbow, sweet nector of the gods.
So that parted ended up pretty well. But now I had another problem. As was typical with pants that I wear, and one of the motivations behind my taking sewing lessons to begin with, the rise, the distance from the crotch to the waistband, was too long. So if I wore the pants at my waist where they’re supposed to sit, then I ended up with this flap of fabric dangling in my crotch (I looked like a refugee from an MC Hammer music video).
Conversely, if I wore them so that they were at the right crotch height, the waistband ended up around my armpits like a senior citizen.
But, eureka! All was not lost! Since I now had acquired some basic skills from the class, it was simply a matter of me taking the waist apart, cutting off a few inches and then reattaching the waistband as described earlier.
The finished product.
Action shot!
And that concluded the Beginner Sewing Class at A Great Notion. Overall, it was a pretty good introductory class. But I still haven’t really learned how to hem properly; that’s its own class. So I think that’s the next class that I’d like to tackle. Unfortunately, it falls on a Saturday, which is when I have rugby. So I’ll have to wait until the season is over, since I don’t think my teammates would be too understanding if I told them “Sorry guys. I can’t play this weekend because I have a sewing class.” I can’t imagine that going over too well.
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