It’s been awhile since part 1 and part 2, since I kept putting off finishing my jeans for a few reasons. First, I ran out of top stitch thread and had a real hard time finding the exact color online or in stores. Then my serger broke, making it not possible to finish my seams properly. However the worst problem I ran into was when I tried to sew the legs up together. I sewed up the inside leg seams and everything seemed okay, but when I tried to sew up the side seams, everything seemed really twisted and the sides were not matching up.

I went back and read and re-read the directions to see how I could have gotten it so wrong. Then I saw it – it mentioned the back leg was supposed to be shorter than the front. When I had adjusted the length on the legs to fit my height, I didn’t account for this. They were both the same length, which caused a problem for this pattern. Since I was not able to properly fix this by cutting out new legs, I decided to just trim from the bottom, so it would at least be able to line up right, even if the shape was not exactly correct. Now the directions made sense, where I needed to ease in part of the inside leg seam and how the sides would match up. Unfortunately, now the plaid didn’t match up, but I couldn’t really do anything about that. Because I had to re-do some of the stitching after I had already finished the seam, I knew these pants would be even tighter which made me nervous. I may not be able to zip them up.

To make sure this wouldn’t happen again, I traced out a new pattern for the front and back legs, properly measured to account for what the difference in length should be. I made sure to shorten where the pattern indicated and traced out a new pattern to use. It’s pretty hard to use a pants leg pattern piece when it’s folded to the right size, so I think this new piece will help for future jeans. After sewing on the waistband and belt loops and top stitching to death, it was time for the moment of truth…

Well they just barely zip up, but these are stretch jeans so they may stretch out a bit. It does seem like no matter what size I make jeans or pants, the waistband always seems too big and doesn’t fit my waist right. This is something I may need to research or work on with the next pair. Not a horrible attempt at this new pattern, but definitely some mistakes to learn from. I’m not sure if I like these better than my green cords, since the fit is not quite right, but it’s getting me closer to my own pair of homemade jeans.