Minerva Blogger Network - Style Arc Claudia Trousers

After my sorry tale last week, I'm back today with something slightly more successful.

For my Minerva project this month I decided to tackle something I’m not quite so confident with and make a pair of trousers. It’s not the making of the trousers I struggle with, but the fitting. However I think I’ve done quite a good job with these.

The wrinkling you see on the side seams isn’t actually there in real life, but it’s hard to pose by yourself using a self timer!
I used a Style Arc pattern – the Claudia stretch woven pant.

I highly recommend Style Arc patterns if you like to keep up with fashion. They release new patterns every month, and they’re pretty good at following current trends in ready to wear clothing. The downsides are you order the pattern size you want, and that's all you get, so if you need to grade between sizes it can take a bit of work; and they are only sold from their base in Australia – although they do have a selection in a newly created Etsy shop.
For my fabric I picked this brown and orange check stretch suiting. I was initially tempted to go with the same fabric in grey, but decided on the brown for a change. Unfortunately I forgot to consider the fact that I don’t own much that goes with brown!

You can see from the pattern drawing above that the trousers have a seam down the front of the legs. I decided to omit this, as I didn’t fancy another place where I needed to pattern match the fabric. Omitting this was easy; I just laid the pattern pieces on the fabric with the seam allowances overlapping and cut the fronts as one piece rather than two.

When I make trousers I often end up with too much fabric in the rear thighs, below my bottom. This time the fit seems better here. There is some wrinkling, but it’s no worse than I’d get from a pair of ready to wear trousers, and the bonus is the waist fits me on these! That’s something that never happens with RTW.
There’s not a lot else to say about these trousers. They fasten at the side with an invisible zip, and have a waist facing instead of a waistband. Next time I might try drafting a curved waistband, as the facing does pop out a bit.
If you fancy some new trousers I can highly recommend both the fabric and the pattern. If you like the fabric, but don’t fancy trousers, it would be equally nice for a dress or skirt, or even a jacket.