Make Pants With Me
MPWM or MTWM (British English)
1. Preamble
2. Pants Fitting and Complications
4. What I Promised Myself and the Making Community
5. Starting out
6. Summary
Preamble
If you are reading this Substack, I hope you share the aim of promoting slow fashion through making garments. We all need clothes, but fashion is one of the planet’s most polluting and exploitative industries.
Making your own clothes achieves more than counteracting detrimental consequences of the fashion industry. It has tangible personal benefits. Others far more eloquent and informed than me have written about both these topics. Every maker comes to the craft of garment construction with their own blend of motivations.
Presenting to a group of undergraduates recently I started by asking the class if anybody was NOT wearing pants. Not a single person raised their hand.
Every single student in the room was wearing pants. Everyone.
If we want to encourage slow fashion we need to make it as accessible as possible for people to make pants.
Fitting aside, there’s a significant amount of knowledge and equipment needed to make your own pants. This is a non-trivial investment of time and resources. If you are living a busy life (and who isn’t?) this takes planning. You might never have baked a cake but the time comes when you decide to change that. Within the span of a single day, you would be able to readily source all the ingredients, equipment and knowhow necessary to change that fact and produce a cake. Not so with making pants.
Pants Fitting and Complications
And then there is the fitting. Which is why I have devoted so much time to making pants fitting accessible, understandable and streamlined. It is a topic of garment making that had become overly complicated and too much of a guessing game. A sewist can put up a photo of themselves in a toile and get ten different suggestions for how to improve the fit. Why?
I believe one reason for this is because sewing educators typically focus on fitting a pattern that they had either designed or were selling. When you focus on one pattern, you get to know that particular draft and can more confidently predict that certain wrinkles can be fixed by particular adjustments. Students looking for solutions to their fitting wrinkles see “Ooh, I have the same wrinkles/excess fabric, let me try this magic fix”. But the fix may or may not apply to another pattern. If it does not the student is left high and dry “I tried this and it didn’t work”. The student spent time making the toile and we all know that learning takes time so this is reasonable. But when a student puts in the time and effort without understanding why “It worked for you but I have no idea why this didn’t work for me”, then it becomes an arduous endurance effort. No wonder so many people give up on pants fitting, or struggle through and then use the same crotch curve forever.
This type of experience is pretty discouraging. The experience of frustration is even more palpable when you are fitting by yourself, which is the case for many.
What I promised myself and the making community
One reason I made TDCO freely available to the public was because I had made a promise to myself. If I was able to figure out a universal approach to pants fitting, I would make it freely available so that nobody who wanted to make pants for themselves would have to be stuck spinning wheels at the fitting stage. Fitting will still take effort and learning, but with TDCO it is confidently manageable.
So going forward, the plan is to make more pants! And help anyone interested in making pants!
Starting out
TDCO is a new approach to fitting pants and I always recommend starting with a basic pattern. If you are on Threadloop, there is a list of suggestions and I just wrote an article for Threads magazine about choosing a quality pattern.
Disclosure
To avoid any conflict of interest, I want to make it clear that I have no financial relationship with any pattern producer or designer. I do not benefit in any way from recommending a pattern. In October this year I ran a 1 day workshop for the ASG chapter in Central Iowa for fitting the Adams pants from Daughter Judy Patterns. The designer provided a discount for bulk purchase of the pattern for workshop attendees and the benefit of the discount went to the Guild making the workshop fee more accessible.
Being on social media and dealing with sewing educators has made me aware of financial relationships that are often not disclosed to the public.
In academia, such relationships would constitute a conflict of interest and there are strict regulations both about transparency and also limitations on the type of relationships allowable. These professional standards benefit everyone, teachers and students alike.
The world of fashion and pattern making is very different. One problem for sewing educators is very low pay. I was told by a very well-known sewing educator that she needed to sell her pattern when teaching a class because the fee people are willing to pay is so low that selling the pattern is the only way to make it financially viable. This is very problematic if we want to build a thriving and sustainable garment making industry with high-quality educational standards. I do not have solutions but this is an important conversation for those of us who want to promote sewing education. And the planet needs us to encourage slow fashion.
Summary
My goal is to help sustainable making with education that meets a professional standard. And I am working to create more tools to help both the makers themselves and the enterprises that support wonderful pattern makers (watch this space!).
My next garment making project will be the Olive pants from designer Ora Lin. This will start February 2025 and I invite subscribers to make this with me. It will be a great introduction to TDCO fitting and a wonderful trans-seasonal versatile functional garment.
Thank you for being here!
Whether you are hygge hibernating or frantically gearing up for 2025, I wish you all the best. Thank you for being here and, as always, I appreciate hearing everyone’s thoughts.
I think I'll join. I've never made pants without an elastic waist.
I draft custom patterns from scratch rather than using commercial patterns. Does TDCO’s universal approach to pants fitting also apply to those of us who create custom patterns? I’d love to know how it integrates with a drafting-from-scratch process.