Thursday, October 14, 2021

Blue Cord Shorts

 When I got KwikSew 3854, it was for view A (shorter version)


When I looked up reviews of the pattern, I discovered that view B was what most people wanted out of it, some to the point of being...ah...very disparaging of view A.  This did serve to make me maybe possibly consider making view B at some point, but determined to make view A first.



This pattern was very easy to make, and I could tell it would be, but I procrastinated for days before finally cutting things because...well...how often do I sew things that aren't obnoxiously patterned?

The only reason I have this not-quite-navy blue pinwale corduroy is because it was in a thrift store fabric grab bag I got in early 2018, and the only reason I decided to use it for this was because there was so, so much of it in that thrift store fabric grab bag.  There's still about 4½ yards left.  So, if it didn't work out, no great loss of yardage, and if it did work, then, hey, a n...neutral item of clothing.

I cut the front in size large and the back in medium, and ended up taking in 2" at the very tops of the side seams at the end.  I followed the pattern directions and assembled these the way you're supposed to sew pants--construct each leg individually, then sew together continuously at the center front and back seams.  Even if I had tried them on at that point, I had already edge stitched along the side seams.  But.  I didn't try them on until they were almost finished, soooo I had to unpick a lot of side seam edge stitching and waistline top stitching.  Corduroy is fairly forgiving, and no-one's going to get close to my waist side seams, so I didn't worry about how the back tacking looked where I started re-sewing the edge and top stitching.  So little worry that I forgot to take a picture to show how messy it may or may not be when you're looking from too close.

I used a see-through grid ruler and tailor's chalk (that I just got--never going to use the little pencils again) to draw where the pleat-securing angled stitching went.

I also--surprise!--edge stitched along all of the folds of the pleats, inside and out.  The thread isn't a perfect match, but--also quelle surprise!--that's fine.

The zipper stash yielded a nice navy option that only needed a bit cut off to be the right length.  The stitching around the zipper did that thing where the pivot at the corner unwinds the lockstitch being formed. I did some panicked back tacking and decided not to worry about it.

I almost just folded the edge into a narrow hem, but decided to do the right thing and  make the blind stitch hem the instructions demanded.  Pressing corduroy can leave unwanted distortions all over the pile--I pressed everything on a towel, and with the point of the iron plate in the centers of seams (and of course a lot of the edge stitching was done instead of pressing, because That's What I Do.)  For the hem, I used the Dritz Ezy-Hem, which protected the outside of the garment from crushed pile while creating a fairly sharp edge.  I didn't worry about whether or not the pile inside the hem got crushed by the iron or not.


I still haven't gotten into my machine to figure out why it doesn't like to revert back to a normal stitch pattern after engaging the blind hem stitch, so I once again took advantage of my particular machine's weird 'variable on the fly' zigzag control to emulate a blind hem stitch by sewing a few stitches then flipping the needle over into a zigzag to catch the folded fabric.  Let go and the zigzag control springs back to wherever the left side is set, which in this case is a straight stitch. 

(to set the zigzag normally, you move both stops together to hold the lever in place.  Yeah, it's weird, but it's nice how it can work to emulate the blindstitch hem.)
 

 It actually works pretty well and isn't hard to coordinate


Instead of a back view, this time there's an interior view

I'll change the serger thread to match someday.



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