Stripy Trousers

Sometimes, fabric is just too good to be left behind. And when I spotted this very cool viscose/georgette/poly-mix fabric at Fabric Land I decided to risk it and buy a metre. I wanted to make a pair of trousers as soon as I saw the fabric but becasue it's quite bright I wasn't sure that I would wear them. However, because the fabric was so cheap I bought some anyway. I wanted to have a go at drafting a pattern and decided that if the worst came to the worst they would be a good experiment, but as it is it was a risk that absoluteley paid off because I love these trousers!

There was no question about it: the trousers had to be cropped, and they had to be wide. I decided on the cropped length for several reasons. The first being that I love cropped trousers at the moment, and the second was because I know that I would never wear a pair of long wide legged trousers. Also, the stripe pattern would have probably been too much had they been full length as it is quite a full on pattern. As for the width, wide legged trousers/ culottes are another design that I currently love (see here) and beacuse the fabric drapes so nicely it was ideal for this design.

I sewed the trousers entirely with french seams, which is probably my favourite way of finishing seams. Despite the fact that the fabric doesn't feel the nicest as it's a blend, the french seams make the trousers feel more luxurious and also stop the seams form fraying. The fabric was quite difficult to photograph but hopefully you can see it fine, it's a black with pale pink and white stripes on it and I really like the pattern.

I love these trousers so much and so much more than I thought I would too. Although the fabric is a bit out of my comfort zone I think they're really wearable (much more so than my marigold trousers) and I especially like them with my black top. For the pattern, I decided to hack the Margot pyjamas from Love at First Stitch. It was really easy to do, I simply widened and shortened the legs. I also used the Margot as a base when I made these trousers, which goes to show how different two variations of the same pattern (albeit with quite a bit of pattern hacking) can look.