Cheery lemon floral coloring book embroidery jeans

This yellow stretch twill from Fabric Mart worked up quickly into this pair of skinny jeans.  The pattern is Ottobre 5-2014-19, which I tweaked from my Nanette Lepore Giraffe Sateen pair.

I’m still loving this pattern for its great leg shaping and low rise (which is regular rise on me!), but I did decide to refine the fit.  It turned out that I did indeed need to take out some excess fabric to deal with some tiny under bum wrinkles.  Originally, I used a magical black twill for my muslin that led me to believe that.  The Giraffe jeans are more than wearable, but the fit was definitely improved by taking out a 1/2″ dart from the inseam, pivoting to nothing at the side seams on the front and back piece.  Peggy Sagers shows you how to drape this out on this video at 14’45”.

The only other alteration I made to these from my previous iteration was to move the pocket placement.  My friend Linda had commented that the pockets looked low, which I found out empirically one day as I was listening to a podcast on my phone.  I went to stash the phone in my back pocket, and noticed that I had to reach down a lot further than I normally would on my Jalies.  It was kind of an unexpected jolt to my muscle memory.

Comparing the back pocket placement on the Jalies to this pattern, the Jalies are higher, and closer to CB.  When I really analyzed it, the roundest part of my posterior is not really centered under the pockets with Ottobre’s original placement.  So for this pair, I copied the pocket placement from my copy of Jalie 2908.  I’m much happier with the placement now.

As mentioned, I further embellished this very cheery lemon twill by embroidering some of the flowers on my right leg.  It was a ton of extra work, but as I have never been content to make plain jeans since I’ve been sewing my own, I’m not sad to have spent the extra time.  I like the added texture and color, and it turns out that embroidery is not nearly as challenging as I originally thought it to be.  Just load up a needle with pretty floss and stitch away.  A running stitch and a backstitch will go a long way in creating any number of different effects.  It was nice to have the framework of the fabric’s flowers to give me some stitching guidelines.  It reminded me very much of a coloring book–just staying in the lines but using thread, not crayons.

I feel quite ready for a tiptoe through the tulips or an idle through the irises peeping up through the snow.  Perhaps I can finish it all of with an outrageous hat like: or

Has Spring bit you yet?  Do you wildly shake your fist in defiance at Punxsutawney Phil?

My updated review is here.

Also, go check out Gray All Day for a lovely link up of womens’ garments: