Patrones 279-06

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I’ve been meaning to make a pair of shorts for a while but I was a bit hesitant due to the fact that I’m still swelling (I hope) and I didn’t really want to spend time making something that wouldn’t fit in a couple of months.  However, I have very little to wear, especially bottoms-wise, so I had to bite the bullet.  I could have bought shorts but where’s the fun in that?

I actually made a muslin for McCall’s 5857 but abandoned it because the pattern had issues.  First, the pattern I have is a 14 through 18 and the 14th was too big.  Second, the waistband is a long straight piece of fabric folded in half.  This is no good because most people are not bricks and they have some curves around the waist.  Not having a contoured, C shape waistband means there is a big gap at the center back.  I have had this issue with another Butterick pattern.  I don’t know why they can’t just draft a proper waistband.

Defeated by that McCall’s, I moved on to a, shoot me, Patrones pattern.  I have sewn a Patrones pattern only once before and it was a massive failure.  After several muslins, I had to throw in the towel.  I now blame that on my lack of skills at the time.  I fared much better this time around.  This pattern came from issue 279, June 2009 and it’s style number 6.  The pattern is fairly straight forward and I did not use the instructions provided and I’m glad because they are horrible.  I am a native Spanish speaker and I found the instructions absolutely useless.  Think about the worst BWOF instructions you’ve ever seen, then multiply that by 100.  That’s how bad these particular instructions were.  I did need a bit of help but I had to dig for a similar Simplicity pattern to figure it out.

The patterns on this issue are sized 38, 42 and 46.  I cut a 38 grading to a 42 at the waist.  I wish I had graded down below the hips because they are actually fairly wide at the hem and I would have preferred less flare. I chose a linen-look fabric for this, it’s a linen-rayon blend (I think).  While I like the fabric, I don’t think it works well with these pleats.  I cannot, for the life of me, get the pleats to lie flat like they do on the model in the magazine.   They just look funny, especially when I walk.  They look funny to me anyway, my husband seems to think the shorts are fine.  I also left the pockets out.  I wish I hadn’t, I think that’s part of why I think the shorts look funny at the sides.

I did a blind hem on these shorts.  I’m having pretty hard time getting the blind hems to be truly blind AND actually work right.  It seems that either shows through too much or doesn’t actually catch the fabric.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong but I clearly need much more practice.

All that said, the shorts are wearable and I suspect they will get a lot of wear this summer.

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