Jeans! (Part 2)

So. Many. Muslins.

Click here for Jeans! (part 1)

So, once school and work were both over for the summer, I embarked on my second pair of jeans. This time, since I wasn’t under a deadline, I decided I would make as many muslins as I needed to until I was sure I had it exactly right. Over the course of the next week, I made at least six different muslins. The first pair was hilariously tight, although the pelvic portion actually fit pretty well. (srsly, people, is there a nicer-sounding word than ‘pelvic’ for the part of pants that’s not the legs? The only other word I can think of is ‘crotch,’ and I really don’t think that’s any better.) Then I struggled, through several pairs, with the dreaded gap-in-back. I might look like I’m straight up and down, but I actually have a pretty round bum, and I’m still learning that the relationship between curves in two dimensions (ie the pattern pieces) and curves in three dimensions (your body, the sewn pants) are not as straightforward as they might appear.

Jeans! (part 1)

My first pair of jeans. Pay no attention to that really terrible-looking corner on the waistband.

So last semester, I took this really lovely draping class. We had three projects: a basic dress that had to follow very specific parameters (easy peasy), another dress for which we had no direction other than to drape on the bias (scary!), and finally, custom fitted jeans! I was so stoked when I heard that. I spent the whole semester bragging to my friends about how, soon, I would know how to make my own jeans.

Finally, barely a month before the end of the term, we were ready to begin the project. We paired up and took a whole bunch of measurements on our partners, then created loose-fitting muslins based on our own measurements. The next week, we put the muslin on over tights and our partners pinned and marked the muslin into the style we wanted. Then we deconstructed the muslin and created a new pattern based on the lines our partner had drawn.

By way of introduction

Earlier this year, my friend Erica asked me to read at the first installment of her new reading series, Hazel. She asked the readers to share ‘a recent writing experiment.’I took a little liberty with the prompt and wrote a fairly traditional essay about an experiment I was doing with my life. This is what I wrote:

Making the Suit

I was born in December, 1980, just before the final month of the lame-duck Carter administration. The Soviet Union dissolved shortly after I turned eleven, and we got our first modem the year I was thirteen. Depending on whose math you go by, I could be either a Gen Xer or a Millenial, or neither, or both. For most of my life, ‘neither’ has felt right.