A Look at Some Curves

You guys, I am so bad at this sewing + blogging + two kinds of school business! I haven't sewn anything since my Slytherin bolero, but I have thought an awful lot about protein structure and fibers. I've also finished drafting my first pants sloper for class, but have yet to sew it up. Even so, it's already been interesting comparing its shape to some of my pants patterns and RTW pants.

My initial draft, based on the pants block that the prof explained in class.  

Traced and ready to cut out in muslin! She wants us to mark (and baste on our muslins) the grainline, high and low hip, crotch, thigh, knee, and calf lines so that we can check for perpendicularity/parallelism to the floor when we do our fittings next week. I'm actually really excited to see if this is why I have all sorts of weird twisting at the inner leg on most of my pants! Also, I never knew that the back inseam is supposed to be 1/2" shorter than the front inseam, to accommodate the stretch of the bias section at the top. 

McCall's 6610 was my first "real" pair of me-made pants, but I did a lot of taking in at the legs and center back. I was never really happy with the crotch fit, and now that I compare the curve on the pattern and the teacher-approved draft, I can see why.

Look at how much more curved the McCall's pattern is!

The back curve is comparable, although I took out quite a bit in the center back seam on the McCall's pattern (said alteration is not reflected here), and not at the side seam, as it seems I should've done, at least according to the sloper. 

I also tried comparing it to the Colette Clovers pattern, and now it totally makes sense why I had to make all the adjustments that I did!

Slightly more curved at the front crotch, but the big difference is in where the legs fall. The Clovers are shifted toward the inseam. The hip is a little curvier, but not obviously so. 

Oops, I didn't line this up correctly. Still, you can see that the back crotch curve of the Clovers is much more "L" than my draft's "J" shape. But oh my goodness gracious great hips balls of fire, would you take a look at that extreme hip curve in the side seam! It's no wonder that they looked like vintage jodhpurs when I first sewed them up.

According to my professor, the usual baggy-crotch problem is the pronounced "J" shape on the front crotch curve. If you think about how a body fits into the pants, the scoop of the J is where your body sits. As she said, unless you're a man, you don't have a lot of errr...junk...to put into that J-scoop. My torso connects to my legs in a straight-ish line, so when I had the excess curve in my Clovers and McCall's 6610s, that led to awkward pooching where my legs connect to my torso, because nothing was filling in that scoop.

Here's my silly drawing to illustrate what I mean. The black line is the front crotch curve going down into the inseam, and the fleshy-colored bit is illustrating a body. When the curve is too J-shaped (as in the middle and on the right), there's all that space between the body and the fabric. Unless you're a man. My prof actually told us that when drafting pants for a dude, you need to find out which side he umm, prefers...and then make that side larger/more scooped to accommodate...things. This was an all-female class, so some people actually didn't understand what she was talking about at first. 

So, we'll see what this sloper looks like when I actually sew it up! It'll be interesting to see how the theories pan out in real life, but I'm inclined to think that my prof is correct about those curves, because 1) she's got years of fitting experience, and 2) I checked all my favorite RTW pants and the front crotch curves are all very flat, hardly curved at all. I'm really, really hoping to get some good pants out of this class!

And now that I've mentioned the word "crotch" a bajillion times, let's watch as my search keywords have a field day!