(no subject)

[shaela]

I finished sewing the fly of my shorts on Sunday — topstitching and everything. It’s sort of a first for me — the last time I tried to make a pair of pants, the fly is where I threw in the towel. I just couldn’t get my head around the pattern instructions. But this time I was smart enough to ask Mama for help, and she showed me how it’s done. (Of course, it still took me a couple of tries to get it right. Note to self: the stitching on the left-hand side of the zipper goes on the left foldline — that is, five-eighths of an inch from the center seam.)

When I was done, I tried them on again, to see if the changes I’d made to the darts had done the trick. Unfortunately, when I showed them to Mama, she didn’t think they looked quite right. I did some research, and it looks like I was supposed to take them in at the side seams, after all. So on Monday, before Mama and I got on the road for Greenville, I tore out the basting and re-drew the stitching lines for the side seams. And then yesterday, I basted along the re-drawn stitching lines and tried the shorts on for the third time.

Unfortunately, they still didn’t look right. I futzed around for a while, and I think what I need to do is take them in a quarter of an inch at the waist, and then another quarter of an inch at the hips. In other words, I could’ve used the same pattern I used for my first sample, and just added a quarter of an inch to the side seams. That’s probably what I’ll do when I cut out the orange and green fabric.