Distressed Ginger Jeans

The start of autumn always means new jeans.  Jeans are the real work horses in my winter wardrobe and even though I work 5 days a week and they only get worn for casual Friday, they are still the most worn item of clothing in my wardrobe.  The Levis copies I made in August 2016 have been worn now for 44 days in the last 16 months, since I started keeping records with Stylebook.  The black pair of Ginger Jeans I made last year have been worn for 27 days and are still in really tidy condition.  I can't say the same for my Levis copies though so it was time for a replacement.

Since making my last pair of blue jeans I have watched Angela Wolf's Sewing Designer Jeans course on Craftsy so this time round I wanted to have a go at distressing using her tutorial.  To do this, I used a very fine sandpaper and after I had stitched and ironed each seam and before the top stitching went on I sanded each seam.  It was a very time consuming process and turned all my fingers blue in the process but I am really happy with the results.  I wanted a naturally worn looking distressing and I think that is exactly what I have ended up with.

The fabric I used is a piece I bought at Spotlight last year.  I was a little disappointed to see after I had cut my jeans out that the fabric had a permanent line folded into it from storage but since I was beyond the point of no return I had to just live with it.  It is a little annoying but hopefully not noticeable unless pointed out.  The pockets are all made using a piece of patchwork cotton from my scraps bin.

I made the usual changes to my Ginger Jeans pattern.  I scooped out the crotch on the back for a low seat, did a knock kneed adjustment and a sway back adjustment on both the yoke and the waistband.  This time I also cut a size 10 and rather than use the high waist version of the skinnys, I used the lower waist stove pipe version and narrowed the legs to the same as the skinny version.

I am really pleased that I went up to a size 10 because I didn't have to increase the rise or add extra fabric to the side seam to account for any difference in stretch in the fabric.  I just cut my fabric to the pattern width instead of adding extra as I have in the past.  There was a lot less fitting in this pair which is definitely a bonus. 

I have found in the past that even though I use interfacing in both pieces of my waistband, I do find that over time they tend to stretch out.  I have cut the waistband on the straight grain to try and combat this with mixed results, but this time round I added twill tape to the top of the waistband after stitching it and so far this has worked perfectly and even after close to 10 wears I don't need to wear a belt.  I will definitely be doing this again.  To finish my jeans off I used the button rivets and thread I bought from Aliexpress.