Shorts!

 Going to be up-front about this project: like the first newsboy cap I made last year, the idea to make this was heavily influenced by something I choose a lot for my character in Animal Crossing--a pair of dark denim shorts.

I've had this vintage Butterick 4703 for years--not exactly sure how vintage it is, since it's from the era when Butterick patterns didn't include copyright dates anywhere, but I'd say it's from the very early 1980s

I had some denim left over from a pair of pants I made for the kiddo a few years ago--definitely not enough for more pants for anyone, but it turned out to be just enough for these shorts (length determined entirely by the available amount of cloth.)

They're really nothing like the ACNH shorts, but there's a lot in life that's not much like Animal Crossing, so that's fine.

This pattern doesn't include a proper fly, and it didn't occur to me to add a fly facing until well into sewing everything, so I decided not to treat the construction of these shorts like "real" jeans.  No flat felled seams!  Basically making them just like I make doll jeans!

  Only with more serging. And a real zipper.

In fact...the zipper I used was salvaged from a pair of purchased jeans (probably one of the pairs to which I added a maternity panel), so it had the advantage of the metal zipper teeth already having been removed at the seam level.

More or less.

Like the doll jeans, I started with the change pocket, although with more details.  I pressed under the edges and used tailor's chalk to transfer the position marks to the fabric.

I do have this slightly heavier thread (Saba C tex 40) in the traditional jeans gold color, but I'd much rather have pink stitching.

'Loads of top stitching' is completely normal for me, so I was prepared for the universal constant: the higher contrast the thread, the more obvious the mistakes. Since there was a possibility this whole thing would result in a garment that didn't fit--or didn't fit well--I was perfectly OK with stitch irregularities.

Because I was ignoring the pattern instructions, I went ahead and assembled the front completely, to sew to the back later.  It seemed like it would easier to install the zipper without dealing with the entirety of the rest of the project in the way and weighing things down, as would happen if you followed the instructions.

 

 

So the next step was to assemble the back.  I pressed the pocket edges and stitched the top edges again before aligning them with the transferred pattern marks.

Then

I remembered that a lot of jeans have decorations on the back pockets.  I checked my appliqué stash to see if I had anything that seemed suitable, but I didn't.  After a moment of thought, I decided I'd use a right triangle to trace basic shapes with tailor's chalk, then stitch over those.  When I opened the drawer to get the triangle, I rediscovered some oval cutting templates, and those immediately seemed like a better idea.  I placed one template and drew around it with chalk, then approximated the position on the other pocket.  After that, lots of contour stitching.

And after that, I realized I should have added some stabilizer to the backs before doing any of the stitching, especially since this is a stretch denim.  Something to remember in the future.

 Once the front and back were assembled, I sewed them together at the inseam

 then pinned the sides and tried them on.  I had cut these in size 16, which I thought could have been too small (I'm still very Mom Shaped), but the test fit showed that I needed to take out some width at the top of the center back seam.  It turned out to be 5/8", so it was easy enough to transfer the reduction to the waistband, which is drafted with a center back seam. 

Then I sewed the side seams and the waistband and the hems.

And then I chose a button.

I procrastinated making the buttonhole for a day or so.

And managed to make it crooked.

And while I have never met a line of stitching that I didn't consider pick-out-able, I was so close to the end of this project that I decided to roll with it.  Done!