Ever wondered how, exactly, pants work*? What kind of crazy pattern-making sorcery goes into drafting a pant? If you’ve ever looked at a “from scratch” pant draft, they’re ridiculously intense. And if you’ve tried one, you’ve probably found out that they’re ridiculously prone to failure. I’ve tried a number of them, mostly with sad results. (Really, if you’ve ever gone shopping for jeans, you were probably aware of this.)
Pant drafts make a lot of assumptions. I don’t know about you, but my backside really hates assumptions. It likes to prove them wrong.
So, I say pant drafts are silly. I never want to draft a pair of pants from scratch. I also don’t like draping pants. Even on a headless, armless pant form, it just feels very invasive. I apologize to the stand the whole time – extra awkward when I’m supposed to be demoing this for a class!
So what’s the solution to this whole hateful mess?
If you’ve already done up Ye Olde Mathless Draft and turned it into a skirt block (or produced a skirt sloper by some other means), you’re half way home. The only real difference between a pant and a skirt is that skirts go over the hips and down. Pants go over the hips and around the crotch. (Think of a pant as a pair of leg skirts.)
So… Ready to turn a skirt block into a pant block?
This is going to be a very graphics-based demo, rather than a photo-based model. I’m pulling this out of a handout that I developed for my Flat Pattern II class, because I absolutely hate the way our book does pant patterns. I have no opinions… ;)
You’re going to need a couple of measurements:
2) Waist to Knee.
The easiest way to take this is with a square. Make sure you read the measurement from the inside of the square!
A lot of books I’ve seen advise taking the crotch depth measurement while sitting very straight on a hard surface like a table, and then measuring from the waist to the table. I don’t think this method gives as true a measurement on bodies carrying more than 15 extra pounds.
*Credit for the nifty title actually belongs to one of my students, Monika, who got very excited during a demo of this material and exclaimed, “Now I know how pants work!” I swear, I teach for those moments. :)
Next: the Draft
Great instructions! Good point on how to measure the crotch depth, that will help when fitting commercial patterns too.
BTW, there may be a problem with the scaling of some of the pics – on my computer, the silhouette pics are displayed 2335 px tall…
Thanks, Anna-Carin! I’ll figure out what’s up with the images – I’m out of practice…