Whew. I’m exhausted. I’m working on making up my jeans for Patternreview’s Jeans Contest and it has been rather slow going. I’m in the mood to work slowly and I also had to redo my back pockets. One of the ladies from my fitting group graciously gave me some tear away stabilizer, but I didn’t practice with any scraps of it. I ended up using too long of a stitch length and my tension was all whacked, so the topstitching thread was all loopy gross and the stabilizer was lost for good. I tried zigzagging over the gross loopies because I’ve seen plenty of RTW jeans with satin stitched sorts of designs on the back pockets, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. That was yesterday.
Today, with fresh eyes, I pulled out some Solvy that I keep around for stabilizing buttonholes. I fused some interfacing to the back of my pockets to keep the denim stretch to a minimum. Then I traced my design on the Solvy and pinned in place. I shortened my stitch length to 3.0 vs the 3.5 that I was using yesterday. The Solvy is really thin, so it pulls out very gently (I used tweezers close to the stitching) which kept the topstitching thread from pulling out.
I also French seamed the pockets.
I wanted a pocket bag entirely out of the voile leftover from the HotPatterns pajamas of doom. I love this fabric so much and a voile pocket would reduce bulk in the hips (who doesn’t want that?!). If I had left it entirely out of voile, the voile would have been peeking out the top of the pocket no matter how well I pressed. To save myself a fight with my iron, I added a little strip of denim at the top of the pocket facing.
No iron wars, and I still get the pretty pocket guts:
I’m going to keep on trucking with these. I’m waiting on all of my hardware in the mail except rivets. I probably won’t get around to posting more until closer to the contest’s end, but since I put in a good bit of work, I thought I’d do a quick post today. Readers, what is taking over your sewing rooms today?
