Category: yellow linen

Cool and almost crisp in new linen pants.

Don’t you think it is about time they are done?  I certainly do. 

It seems like I have spent FOREVER on these pants, although they have actually just been sitting in my sewing room all that time, waiting for me to squeeze in bits of time here and there.

I planned to finish them Friday, and  in fact had just attached the waistband (partially) when we decided to take a spur of the minute trip into NYC.  I knitted on the train, had a fabulous lunch at The Alamo which is a terrible name for  a Mexican restaurant but the food is really excellent.  We each had a different kind of ceviche to start, then George had the fabulous Chicken with Huitlacoche sauce and I had Grilled Scallops — ooooh so good!

We went to the National Design Museum (Cooper Hewitt forever in my mind) and saw the Extreme Textiles  exhibit which was wonderful because it appealed to both my fiber loving and my techie nerdy tendencies.  They also have swatches posted that you get to touch and feel.  How cool is that!  I love the whole idea of using modern materials and traditional techniques to make something really strong and useful and wonderful.  Amazing stuff!

I finished the machine sewing Sunday morning because Saturday somehow got out of hand.  The hem took another couple of hours so the pants weren’t actually done until last night.  Not much interesting to see here:  they’re only pants after all, relatively boring sewing.

In the end I left off the drawstring and did a modified elastic waist.  There is still a back zipper and darts, but elastic as well, kind of a hybrid pair of pants. 

The hand hem kind of takes them out of the really fast and simple category I guess, but I really like the way they turned out and I am happy. 

I finally started working on my linen pants.  They should be a simple project but I seem temperamentally incapable of just whipping something up.  Of course I would start a new project just hours before going away for a couple of days… well, this way I have something to look forward to when I return.

I decided that I will let the lining hang free on these pants, not my usual method, but I think more appropriate for this lightweight linen.  That means that I have to finish the seams more nicely.  If I were completely bagging the lining I could just serge the edges, but somehow can’t bring myself to do that if they will be seen, even if only by me.  Besides, this is a fairly ravelly linen and I don’t trust the serging to hold.  So I made French seams instead.  They are only one seam pants so that was not so bad, but I French seamed the lining too.  On the linen I also zigzagged in the seam allowance as the  sheer parts of the linen were starting to pull out of the seam stitching already, and I thought this would be extra protection.

It may be merely excessive and I may regret it.  I hoped that the weight of the seam will help the hang of the pants, but it may not work.

I also got the zipper in and the lining attached at the zipper, but I have not sewn the crotch seam yet.  Somehow I am having trouble keeping my legs straight and am getting them all in a tangle.  This could be because it is nigh unto midnight.  With a clear head, sewing the crotch curve is a piece of cake, but I am not confident of my late night mental competence.

To be continued upon my return.