scrappily sewing scraps

Pants, its a word that means different things to different people. Trousers, underwear, and more colloquially rubbish/no good, as in “that’s pants”.

Today I have made an item that ticks the last two boxes.

Maybe I should’ve known better than to try and squeeze some underwear for myself out of the last scraps from The Girls’ dress. Perhaps warning bells should’ve rung when I had to cut my back and front in 2 pieces each. Maybe it’s just today, the cutting out last night didn’t go do badly (from a pattern I self drafted previously). (Well, the cutting went ok once I’d figured out how the pattern pieces worked. I missed marking a fold line on my front pattern piece and couldn’t figure it out at all. My respect for pattern drafters just shot up, I can’t even make things that are clear for me!)

In all their ungloriousness (actually, they don’t look to bad here, but the camera was on fancy shmancy filter mode)

Here’s my list of things that went wrong:

The stripes on front/back seam don’t match – no biggie I thought and ploughed on.

I decided to zig zag the seam allowance down, because… nope, no idea why I thought this was the right thing to do.

I used white thread already in my machine to do this, on the predominately navy fabric, so it really shows up.

I forgot my machine was still set at “stretch stitch” length, so one of these unsightly lines of zig zags is in triple stitch, making it even more ugly. Obviously this is the front, not the back.

I sewed the back/front/gusset together wrong and had to unpick them and re do it.

I decided to sew the side seams next…

…which meant that when when topstitching the gusset down I sewed through the top of the front near the side seam as well.

Of course, this time, I’d changed my thread to navy, so this was a b***er to unpick as I couldn’t see most of the stitching.

And the unpicking left holes.

At this point, I nearly gave up and threw it away.

However, I persevered. I was reminded of Erin’s “I am” series at this point. I was thinking that maybe I could say “I am determined”, but I was worried that “I am bloody minded” or “I am foolhardy” or “I really should take a break now” would be a better fit.

I decided that they didn’t deserve the lovely coloured fold over elastic that I’d managed to buy online. (My previous foray into making my own underwear halted due to the expense – it was basically taking a whole 2m pack of elastic to make one pair, which was prohibitively expensive). However, I bought a roll of elastic cheaply through the Make Do and Mend Pre Loved Craft Stuff that turned out to be fold over elastic, albeit a bit on the wide side for underwear. So I used that instead.

And, I have working underwear. That I think (from a 2 min try on) is comfy. If not pretty. I mean, asides from the above, I didn’t manage to overlap my F.O.E. very well on 2 out of the 3 places , sigh. Then I really badly patched the small holes from the back with a scrap of fabric, so I’ve covered them with an improvised ribbon bow. However, only my husband and small kids (who don’t respect my privacy) are going to see them, and they won’t care.

However, next time, I will make a better job of it. For my pride if nothing else. And I may use that FOE for the waistband on another pair and some of the thinner black stuff for the leg holes.

Then again, I may cave and buy the Barrie Brief pattern.