Wool Pietra Pants

After level 4 lock down finished, I may have fallen off the fabric diet and visited The Fabric Store.  Actually I visited both The Fabric Store and Fabric Vision on the same day.  I think I was having withdrawal symptoms despite having more than enough fabric at home to last much longer than the 4 week compulsory retail absence.  On that visit I picked up this lovely piece of wool blend suiting that I intended to make into pants for work. I am getting a little tired of my regular offering of black pants and wanted to mix things up a bit.  Now, I am not normally a brown wearing person.  In fact, if truth be told, brown and I aren't really friends at all and the colour often sucks the life out of my skin so for this reason I tend to avoid it.  This brown, however is more of a blue based brown than yellow which is all over rtw at the moment and works with my skin tone much better.  

I chose the wool suiting as an option for this pattern because, it is warm for winter, has minimal wrinkling and I really love the design of the front of this pattern.

When I bought the fabric, I knew it would be high up in my sewing queue and also that I wanted to make an easy to wear pair of winter pants with an elastic component.  Because elastic waisted pants are a difficult thing to pull off in the office, Closet Case Pietra Pants were back of mind.  Because they are business in the front and party in the back, I could style them to look more put together than the usual elastic waisted offerings. 

I have made the Pietra Pants five times before.  The first as a pair of pants in linen.  These pants I now have a love hate relationship with.   The linen wrinkles terribly, has washed even worse and to top it off grows several sizes within half an hour of putting them on.  The second pair I made as shorts in some lovely heavy weight linen from The Fabric Store and I still love these.  The third pair were made also in linen and as pants and because of my struggles with the first pair, I don't think I have even worn these.  The last two pairs were made for my daughter as shorts.  She also loves this pattern and it is her go to for tidy shorts for summer.

Because I had made this pattern so many times, they were reasonably quick to make. My pattern already included the removal of quite a bit of the width at the side waist on both the back and the front.  I always insert an invisible zip so all of this ease was just unnecessary.  I did come unstuck though when I tried them on.  There was just way too much fabric in the legs and drag marks down the back of the pants.  I had already scooped the crotch which is a normal alteration for me but I also decided I needed to shorten the rise a smidge.  My solution for this was to run the entire inner leg in by the width of the presser foot.  I know this is not a recommended alteration but it certainly solved the rise problem but not really the drag lines at the back of the leg.  To fix this I unpicked the entire centre leg seam and removed a further 1cm from the back inner leg from memory.

Once the pants were finished, I started to think about what I was going to wear with them.  Because this colour doesn't really feature in my wardrobe, I needed to avoid them being a wardrobe orphan.  I had a rummage around and found this remnant of light weight cotton spandex knit.    Being so light weight I knew it needed to be made into a drapey type of knit top.  Tessuti Monroe fit the bill and is a pattern that I already own, so this became my plan.  

I cut the pattern to the smallest size because this pattern runs really big and I really can't pull off over sized tops.  This was really quick to make up with most of the construction on my overlocker and my coverstitch used for the hems.  I knew my coverstitch would object to the light weight fabric so I used fusible hem tape to stabilize the hem before stitching.  This worked a treat and avoided the frustrating skipped stitches that are common with a lot of my attempts at using this machine.

I absolutely love this outfit.  It is comfy and cozy and looks somewhat put together for the office.  I wonder what else I can find to wear with these pants!

On a side note;   today New Zealand has reached a milestone.  Our team of 5 million have managed to eliminate Covid-19 from the country.  We now have no active cases and have moved down another level to the lowest of levels, level 1.  What this means for us, is that life has returned to pre Covid times.  There are no more restrictions and distancing required.  Yes we need to be vigilant but the only change is that our borders are shut.   Lets hope we can keep Covid out and this isn't a temporary thing.

Pants

Fabric $28.0

Pattern (used before) $0.00

Elastic $1.50

Total $29.50

Tee

Fabric (remnant) $0.00

Pattern (free) $0.00

Total $0.00