The Last of the moomins (How much value can you get from a €4 pair of jeans?)

You know I said that more trousers were overdue? Here you go!

Why

I try to live in jeans or trousers and have been slowly wearing down my supply of casual trousers. With my purple jeans out of action I'm at a bit of a loose end, especially for cosy trousers and ones which don't require a belt. So bulking up this supply is the order of the day.

The Pattern

The pattern is traced from my €4 Helsinki jeans. You can read the whole saga of pattern development in my 2015 posts. I was pretty confident this would work, especially having tested the first 3 pairs extensively.

A couple of things for me to remember for future:

• These are very low rise in the front and I may try out a double-height waistband
• A longer/taller fly gvuard would be useful as the pattern piece is very short
• I marked a foldline on my pocket piece - which was a very nice surprise from past-Katrina. It made current-Katrina's life a lot easier!

A side point is that I've noticed that a lot of RTW jeans have waistbands which are cut as one piece. The formal trousers I've sewn all have multiple pieces to the waistband (generally 3, sometimes 4). Is the fact that lots of jeans have the front on some sort of bias the main reason why they're so comfy? Or is it the main reason they fall down after a while?

The Fabric

One of my oldest fabrics paired with one my newest fabrics. The needlecord came from Edinburgh Fabrics (Aug 2017) and the pocket linings are the very last of my beloved Moomin fabric (Dec 2010). They go together so well!

Construction

Fairly standard construction, I tried to pay attention to fabric nap and had a few struggles trying to turn corners. Otherwise I didn't give it any special treatment. There are a couple of interesting things of note:

• I've tried to adopt the *new method* to insert a zip fly, where the fly guard is added after the topstitching, it saves a few headaches and I really like the order.
• I was a bit lazy with waistband finishing because I wanted these to be ready to take on holiday, so it's "good enough" rather than "perfect"
• I added buttonhole elastic to the waistband just in case things didn't work out.

So there you go, my new super-comfy, super-soft, super-strokeable cords!

K