OMG, shorts, you all!

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just hanging out here by my favorite geranium in my shorts. That I made.

My favorite photographer is not available tonight, so that's the best I could do for now in terms of modeling them. But I learned a ton from this project, and I'm pretty proud of some of the workmanship here, so indulge me a bit.



So this is the result of all my futzing with the Pleasant Pathways shorts pattern, made up in Field Study linen by Anna Maria Horner.

Muslin #2 revealed that I had gone a little overboard with the pattern alterations. So I added an inch back to the center front:

and I took 1/2 inch off at the hems (not pictured.)

Widening the legs took out the darts (not a problem for me, I haven't much of a booty), so I had to straighten out the back waistline.

OK, enough pattern alterations. Let's talk construction.

Have you seen my invisible zipper? (Ha!)

(I just bought an invisible zipper foot for my machine, and it is awesome.)

To finish the inside seams, I used the tutorials in this post by Made By Rae.

For the front and back seams, fold over seam allowances and topstitch:

For the inseams, flat-felled seams. Yeah, flat-felled seams. I went there!



On the outside:

For the side seams, I just fake overlock-stitched each fabric edge, then pressed to the back of the garment and topstitched. I couldn't figure out any other way to deal with the zipper:



Finally, I edgestitched along the top edge of the waist and the bottom edge of the leg openings, to keep the facings from showing on the outside:

And topstitched along the lower edge of the waist facing, to give the shorts a bit more  structure--a kind of a faux waistband:

Let us now begin the litany of things I will try to do differently/better next time:



First of all, the leg facings. I don't even know. I have a lot to learn about drafting facings, let's just leave it at that. (Attaching the waistband facings gave me some trouble too, but I think I mostly pulled it off.)

You can see in one of the pictures up at the top of the post that the waistband dips down at the center back. I'm not sure why that happened--maybe the grainline got messed up when I made the other alterations to the pattern?

Also, I feel like there's extra fabric at the inside of the legs. In retrospect, I think a better strategy for widening the leg openings might have been to just try to draw the outside edges of the legs straight down from the hips (you can see in the pics of the pattern pieces above that the outer edge of the leg curves inwards), rather than adding fulness in the middle of the leg by slashing the pattern piece.

All that said, I'm looking forward to wearing these tomorrow.



And I'm submitting this project to the "Shorts on the Line" contest, apparently just under the wire before the deadline. Mostly I am grateful to the bloggers behind Imagine Gnats and Small + Friendly for organizing this event, and motivating me to finish a project for myself!