Pants, pants, pants, pants...Pants!

I mentioned that one of my major projects this month was going to be pants for the hubby. He has a very hard time finding well fitting pants in RTW - y'all know the story - which means it's no treat for me to fit him either. Still, the man needs pants that fit, so I toiled on. Our first wearable muslin is in process, but I noticed something really interesting as I was going through the muslin process, and I wanted to share it with you.

And here it is. My hubby and I have exactly the opposite fitting challenges when it comes to making pants. Can you see how different our shapes are from the side? His waist sits very low, while mine is quite high. The curve of his buttocks starts almost immediately after his waist, while I have a "ski slope" (Thank you Heather, for that term) down to my actual butt. The shape of his butt is much more round, while mine is flat. After having this epiphany, I realized that this was why I was having such trouble fitting his pants. I was trying to make them work like mine, and they don't.

So, for my low-butted, long & high waist, the alterations I make are these. This is Jalie 2908. The orange line is the original pattern, and the red is mine. You can see I raised the waistline - an inch at CB, tapering down to 3/4 inch at the side seam. The front is raised 3/4 inch all around as well. For the crotch, I have to scoop out the curve to allow for my lower backside, but since my butt is flat, I don't need any extra space down there really, so I leave the hip line and the crotch hook alone.

Here is Mitch's pant pattern. This is BWOF 10/2005-132. Again, the original pattern (without seam allowances) is in orange. The red line is the altered pattern. You can see that I shortened the rise quite a bit. I also shortened the darts significantly, although that isn't as obvious here. Joost reminded me that darts should point to the area of maximal fullness, which on Mitch is quite close to his waist. While Mitch's rise is fairly short, she still has a fairly long total crotch length, since he is quite full back there. I added length back to the crotch hook, giving the length he needed to go over his buttocks, but without increasing the rise, which would have just put us back to square one. Since his fullness is much higher than mine, instead of scooping out the crotch curve, I actually had to flatten it a bit. I also added width to the hip area, to go around the circumferential length, which balanced out the additions elsewhere.

Here is the final muslin, with the changes as above. I could probably tighten up the fit in the thigh area, but Mitch likes his pants on the more relaxed fit side, so I'm leaving it for this first version, which I'm making in a pretty stiff cotton canvas. Hopefully, I can show you the fruit of my labors soon.