Obsessing Over the Tape Pants

I continue to be obsessed with my hunt for perfectly fitted pants. I have sewn so many pairs of pants I actually exhausted my stash. Yes, I know that that is hard to believe. But I had to go back to the fabric store for some more twill.

I have purchased Pants for Real People, and remain frustrated with my baggy hind end. I will say, though, that thanks to PFRP I was able to identify the smiles at the front crotch as "false smiles" that did not need an extension of the crotch curve, but some additional tissue at the hip.

But, as Rachelle at Smoking Needles pointed out, PFRP don't really address fit issues for the combination of relatively flat stomach/small waist/junk in the trunk. Which is frustrating, because I know a lot of people who struggle the same way that I do with pants. Seriously, for YEARS I just wore men's jeans as "low-riders" because there was no way I could find women's jeans to fit. Fortunately, some stores like Ann Taylor, Ann Taylor Loft, and Banana Republic have added a "curvy" fit to their lines, and these fit better.

But why can't I get a pattern to fit properly? I can get the front flat, I can get the back rise right to cover my bum, the side seams lie perfectly vertically, yet I STILL have that lump of extra fabric just under the tush.

So, I busted out some assistance from the kitchen. I wanted to find out what my actual crotch curve was, since that is the issue that I can't fix. I took a long length of aluminum foil and wadded it up to make a strip that would hold it's shape. Then I molded it to my crotch curve. Thank god I was home alone, because J would have really wondered what I was up to.

This is what I got:


So I traced that off onto a piece of newsprint:


Here you can see the front curve is actually pretty close:


But that back curve, oh my!


Here you can see the changes that I made to the pattern. The red line is the tracing of the original pattern, and the black is what I changed to accommodate the tracing of my crotch curve.

I only made slight changes to the front:


But the back, what a mess:


I took out some additional at the top back to make a better curve over the bottom, but I also added a significant amount of height to the inseam. Because of this additional length to the inseam, I took a wedge out of the leg....since otherwise the back inseam would be about 2 inches longer than the front inseam. To do this, I just slashed the pattern, overlapped, and taped:


I am ready to make another version, and have this pattern cut out from some khaki twill. I will report back on my anticipated spectacular success....or not.