Prototype Pants : Pattern Mash

I've been planning a pair of pants to go with the "too scary" tiger jumper. I don't have a pattern for the jumper, or ribbing for the cuffs (thanks everyone for your tips), nor did I have a pattern for the pants. But none of those technicalities can keep this good idea down.

 

The trousers that I want to make are a copy of a pair of pants that I picked up on sale for P back when I was buying clothes for the kids. The front has articulated knees and a faux fly and the back has a full leg with a yoke at the waist area. There are some wonderful stitched details on the pockets and some little fancy designer tags that I'm going to pilfer for my knock-off copy-pants. They fit wonderfully well for a long time but he is finally outgrowing them.

 

Without a pattern that had all the required elements I decided to mash a couple of patterns and see what came of it.

 

I had the front of the pants covered with my Field Trip pattern and then the back looked like it wanted to be a pair of After School pants.

 

Can you make the front of one pair of trousers and stick them on the back of another? I had no idea, but I was prepared to have a go. Or, in more fancy sewing talk, to make a wearable muslin (ooooh,... I find it quietly hilarious when I start sounding like I know what I'm doing)

 

I figured as long as the front and back pieces ended up the same length along the side seams it would work. And it kinda did. There's probably a bit more 'room' at the rear than there needs to be and there may have been a little bit of tugging to get some bits to line up and be sewn but in all they look like one pair of pants.

 

The fabric that I used is a light weight drill with a self stripe that may have a bit more bias stretch than the fabric intended for my ultimate pants. I may make some minor adjustments to my pattern pieces or I'll just cut it with my fingers crossed for luck.

The pants were a pretty quick sew as I left off the cargo pockets and did minimal top stitching in keeping with them being a practice run. Then I spent ages in paint.net making myself a little Pattern Mash button!
 

 

The other element of my designer daks that I wanted to copy was a thin section in the inner leg. The After School pants has an outer leg stripe which had to be taken out of the pattern piece that I had for the back pants. I held my fingers against the pattern pieces and guessed that the back pattern piece would need to be a few fingers wider to make up for the lack of the side leg section. I think I effectively cut the size 5 pants piece but took the side seam out to the size 8 line.

then I sliced the front pants pattern piece to give myself this inner leg section:

In order to do this I had to fold the articulated knee pattern piece in the middle to make it the same width as the adjusted upper and lower leg pieces. By folding it I was able to preserve the knee darts of the original pattern piece.

To make that mash more palatable here's the summary:
1. Field Trip front pants - narrowed by a inner leg strip
2. After School rear view - widened to side seam
3. Field Trip rear pockets rather than the smaller After School ones
 

So there's my Pattern Mash pants. I'll tweak them a bit for the final version I think...

Here is the button that I made with some HTML code for anyone else to have it too.

<a href="http://bartacksandsingletrack.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img alt="Pattern Mash ; Bartacks and Singletrack" src="http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l58/sette_budini/patternmash.jpg" /></a>

I'm not kidding myself that anyone else will want to grab my button I just wanted to learn how to write the code to do it! Thanks to Teacher Blogging Basics for the clear instructions.

 

And here's P hanging out in his new pants.

 

 

 

 Today's photo shoot was brought to you by Puffin and Big Bird.