Tuesday 20 May 2008

Shorts from Jalie 968 jeans pattern

 
  
 
These shorts are pseudo jean shorts for my daughter's travel wardrobe. I used a technical polyester fabric by cutting up a vigilante wrap travel dress of mine that unfortunately had a stain on the upper front. The dress was a terrific travel garment, so I am sure the fabric will wear well, dry quickly, and be cool and comfortable to wear. It has an almost suede like right side texture, whilst the wrong side is smooth.
I traced out a size Q, then morphed the Jalie jeans pattern slightly to make the shorts. First I cut the leg wider from below the hip, and cut the leg as long as the fabric would allow to give me wriggling room later. Next I altered the front pockets. In order to avoid having 5 layers of fabric, I eliminated the change pocket, the fabric behind the hip facing, the facing for the front bag, so ended up with one layer of fabric above the pocket, and a maximum of 3 layers of fabric through the pocket itself. I hope this will allow the garment to dry more quickly. I made the waistband much more skinny, and did not interface the waistband, or use belt loops. My daughter does not like to wear a belt with shorts. I put in the zip a little differently this time, I did not use the Jalie instructions to topstitch the crotch seam before making the fly front, and the construction was more straight forward.
To finish the shorts I topstitched in pink thread to match the pink t shirts. I could not source pink topstitching thread, so used the triple stitch on my machine. This worked quite well except for the curves, where the back and forth motion of this stitch made each layer a little distorted in placement compared to the next layer of the same stitch. Because of this, the fly topstitching looks a little amateurish. I used a straight diagonal topstitch on the back pockets to avoid this problem here. I have put a bar stitched cross at the base of each pocket to disguise a mistake on one of them - this triple stitch is terrible to unpick.
The shorts fit well and we are quite happy with them. The photographs were taken indoors with a flash, and make the shorts look much more wrinkly than they appear in real life. I hope to photograph them later with some of the other garments I have planned for this week.
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2 comments:

Keely said...

Those shorts look great! When I can't find the right colour topstitching thread I often use 2 strands of normal weight thread threaded through as one. It works well.

Nancy Winningham said...

Those shorts are really, really cute!