Pattern: New Look 6058 view D

It’s always nerve-wracking to finally cut into that fabric that you bought a few years ago and you love so much. I knew when I bought the black textured fabric used for this project that I wanted to make some fancy pants with it, ones that could be worn on a night on the town. I even had a name for them – the New Year’s Eve pant, because it reminded me of an outfit I wore a long time ago on New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, I didn’t go out on the town on New Year’s Eve and I also didn’t finish these in time to wear them until well into February. So instead, these have been dubbed the 2018 pants. A still-hopeful name for pants that I at least finished within the year, right?

Unfortunately this year is not what I thought it would be personally. After starting a new job last fall, I thought finally my career was finally taking off after a slow start and some difficulty. But sometimes these things don’t work out, even when you try your hardest at something. At the start of this year I found myself exactly where I didn’t want to be – struggling to find another job. Some years have so many positive memories that you can’t help but look back and smile. This will not be one of those years. However, it’s okay as I feel I will be a stronger person for it in the end.

These pants gave me almost as much anxiety as my newly realized unemployment. Fitting pants is quite difficult with my body type and I knew that I needed to make a muslin to feel things out. I took my measurements and first made sure to adjust the crotch, which tends to hang really low on pants’ patterns for some reason. When I sewed the legs up, I realized these pants were really huge on me and even with the zipper seam allowance it was not going to work. Part of the problem was also that I was ramping up on my half marathon training and losing weight as I made this. I adjusted the pattern before I cut into my material and hoped for the best.

The one thing that gave me trouble on my muslin was the zipper. The pattern had me putting in a regular zipper, which I actually haven’t had too much practice on. The directions made no sense and everything I tried just didn’t work right.

In total frustration, I actually gave up on these – if I wanted to make them wearable in the future, I could come back to it. And I decided to buy an invisible zipper because I felt that would work better for these pants and at least I could figure out how to sew one in properly.

In the end, the zipper worked great for these. The size…not so much. I was still losing weight as I was finishing up my other projects and when I finally came back to this, it still ended up a size too big. This was not the look I was going for. However, I do still think these are pants are wearable and the fabric is something unlike anything I have in my closet. I’m not a fabric expert at all, but it kind of seems like it might be a brocade. However I could be completely wrong as I got it unlabeled at a discount fabric shop.

A difficult project for a difficult year, but in the end, I think it will be alright. And hopefully the same goes for the year itself. I’ve faced challenges worse than this before and I know there will be a lot of good things to come in my future.