New Favourites

 

I think I may be able to make Ginger jeans now with my eyes closed I have made that many pairs!  Despite skinny jeans falling from fashion grace of late, I do find them extremely cosy in the winter so I am not about to ditch mine in the name of fashion just yet.  Another thing I really like in the winter is merino and in fact, wool in general, as long as it doesn't itch.  So if you marry wool and jeans, you have a match made in fashion heaven if you ask me!  My latest pair of Ginger's are made of exactly that and I think they are my new favourites.

The fabric I bought at Spotlight when I was in there shopping for something else all together.  As destashing is  my new fabric mantra, I wasn't about to consign this new fabric to my stash.  I needed to make these up stat!  Because I bought 3 metres of the fabric I had high hopes of being able to make two pairs but alas my fabric was quite narrow and I only had enough for one and a bit.  A bit is not a lot of use really so instead of not adding to my stash, I realised I would end up with an awkward piece of fabric left over.  I ran this past Courteney, thinking I could buy another piece and initially she didn't show a lot of interest in a pair for herself so I planned to make some sort of skirt with what I had left.

I made up my new pants in my usual manner with my now altered to my shape, Ginger pattern.  I really love making pants without all of those fitting woes which is another reason I am drawn to the Ginger pattern.  I topstitched the pants using some topstitching thread I bought at Aliexpress.  Aliexpress really is the best place to buy sewing notions if you don't mind waiting for the voyage from 

China.

I used a piece of scrap fabric from my remnant bin for the pockets.  Because my denim is super stretchy, I hatched a plan to make pocket stays out of the woven pocket fabric.  I simply traced my pattern fronts to make both the pocket and facing which turned out better than I hoped.  Before I could feel too clever though, disaster struck the very first time I put my new jeans on.  The zipper pull came right off the end of the zipper.  Oh dear!  I thought my project was dead in the water.  I promptly threw the remaining Aliexpress zippers in the bin.  I very nearly threw the whole project in the bin but with quite a bit of time and money invested in these pants I decided to have a go at replacing the zip.  At this point I had nothing to lose.

Despite my absolute dislike of repairs of any description I managed to replace that darned zip with hardly any stress (think cursing, high blood pressure, in fact all the things that usually go with repairs) and finished the pants.  You would think that would be the end of the story but no, these pants are definitely cursed because a little over a week later the same thing happened.  A tooth managed to come free from the base of the zip and the zipper once again came apart, what the....., this never happens!  The only reason I can see for this is the pocket stay has somehow put pressure on the zipper resulting in failure of the zipper.  This time, however, I opted not to start again and promptly took the pants to the garage and ripped out another zipper tooth with the pliers so I could put the pull back on again.  With a needle and thread I zipped that darn thing up and stitched over and over at the base of the zip so the teeth didn't pull apart.  I hope this does the trick because I really love these pants.   To add insult to injury, while I was taking these photos I managed to catch one of my belt loops and ripped a hole in the pants where the loop attaches.   

I really don't think these jeans will be around for long.  I just hope they last the winter.