For the last few months, Fabric Mart has had a selection of medium weight synthetic knits with metallic foiled designs. The listings say they're "from the same manufacturer that creates leotards for Team USA Gymnastics." If so, I'd still guess these particular fabrics have been dead stock for a very long time, because they have a distinct air of Early 2000s Cheese to them that I of course found irresistible.
I ordered three different prints when they were $2 per yard, then went back for a fourth when they were briefly reduced to $1 per yard.
One of them I wanted to make into leggings, but I knew not only that they wouldn't be stretchy enough to use my regular tights pattern (which is another possible hint at the fabrics' age, from back before spandex started infusing everything), but, even if it would work, the print was too strongly geometric to use with that no-side-seam pattern. I decided to try the tights part of Simplicity 8042, which I had only made once before, and six years ago, and very disapointingly.
I was determined to make them work, and, after a lot of pinching and sewing and pinning and sewing and sewing again to make things less angular, I got where I wanted.
They are aggressively shiny.
I had been using an 80/11 ballpoint needle for the mesh shirts and the tights in the previous posts, but this fabric is noticeably heavier, so I switched to a fresh 90/14 ballpoint needle, and it sewed beautifully.
Credit for the nice stitches should probably also go to my Saba thread--not because of the brand, but because it's a decent thread; I figured out quite on accident that the reason I used to have such a terrible time sewing knits was probably because I used to use cheap thread of dubious quality. Good thread, fresh ballpoint needle, and a relative sturdy knit fabric work together nicely.
I sewed every seam with a long narrow zigzag on the lockstitch machine, saving the serger for making things tidy. (I know you can do a lot more with a serger. Making seam allowances look nice is really all I want from it...especially since it still likes to break needles installed on the left to make sturdier seams.)
The waist elastic was installed by sewing it into a loop, marking that loop in quarters, pinning the marks to the seams on the inside, then zigzagging the elastic edge to the raw edge while stretching everything as much as possible, serging over that zigzagging, and finishing by folding to the inside, which hides the elastic, and stretching and zigzagging that same edge again.
I like how finished this method looks, even if the lockstitch machine isn't really suited to it. And it avoids the potential frustration of trying to insert elastic into channels sewn into a knit. The big drawback, though, is that it's really hard to pick out if it needs to be redone.
Cutting the elastic at 27" worked. I cut the pattern itself at size M (14-16), which is the largest this copy of the pattern has. I worried that it would still be too small, because my hips and waist (especially the waist) are larger than 16. I ended up re-sewing the side seams and inseam about an inch narrower all around, then trying them on inside-out and pinning out excess around the knees.
I worried that I might have taken the ankles in too much, but after folding and hemming (no serging there), they gained a smidgen of width.
The width and length of the zigzag are blurrily visible here.
The back of the leggings don't look much different from the front when on the hanger, but, since it's a proper pattern, there is more room back there.
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