Beating Cold Weather with Cool Pants

School holidays have just ended here in Sydney, and we took the opportunity to take our kids on a proper winter holiday - they'd never seen snow before! 

We decided to travel to Mt Hutt, near Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand. I'd been keeping tabs on Andrea's blog through late May and June - and she was talking about really cold weather and even snow :).  

Two days before we left I mentally reviewed our clothes for cold weather.  Mr UpSewLate has an internal heating system that keeps him toasty even at ridiculously cold temperatures, so he was fine. We were all OK for ski clothes, but I wasn't sure about the non-skiing days...  how cold would it be? Would my jeans be cosy enough?  I didn't think so...

The threat of cold weather was a great excuse - I'd been planning these pants for months, even before I saw Rachel make the same pants from the same fabric! (What can I say, great minds think alike??).

The fit on my earlier Anita pants turned out to be quite wrinkly under the butt area (oh really, I didn't show you that photo?) - as usual (grrrr), should've expected it - so two nights before we were due to leave I switched to study mode and cut myself off from normal household conversations.  I studied Ruth's fitting comment on my red pants, scanned the pants pages of Sarah Veblen's "Complete Photo Guide to Perfect Fitting", and logged onto Craftsy to fast forward/rewind/fast forward my way through Sandra Betzina's pants fitting tips. And all swotted up, next morning I whipped these pants into a better shape :).



Doesn't look too cold in these photos, does it... but look past the trees, to the right. There's snow!!!

This spot is just somewhere we pulled over for photos on our way to a walk at Rakaia Gorge - to me it's a typical, gorgeous Canterbury Plains view. It was so much colder than it looks - you get a better feel for the temperature in this next photo, taken about an hour later (but excuse my ridiculous boots):

OK, OK, enough with the tourist shots, talk about the pants.

Some close ups now, and I'll describe the fitting changes I made:

Just a few small under-butt lines, + pattern matching over side seam

As I mentioned above, my earlier version of these pants suffered from under-butt wrinkles.  I always have this problem with RTW pants, and the last jeans I bought that fit reasonably well were described as a "curvy" fit.  To paraphrase Ruth's comment on my red pants, wrinkles under the bum say "you need a prominent rear adjustment" (and when you combine this with a swayback Ruth says you get the much more charming sounding "pert bum adjustment"). Translated to a ponti, I figured I could just add a bit of extra length in the curvy area of my bum.

To do this I scooped out the bum curve just a little and extended it about 2cm for a deeper crotch. The inner thigh seam had to join up to this new deeper crotch, so I did a rough bit of grading to adjust the inner thigh line. Scooping out the bum curve also removed a bit of fabric at centre bum (perhaps in the under bum area really?), and I was worried this could remove necessary fabric width across my bum, so I added 0.5cm width to the sides around hip level.

I don't seem to have clear photos to show how well this worked: there is still a little bit of wrinkling under my bum, but it's absolutely inconsequential compared to the amount of wrinkling I normally have in leggings or pants. Very small changes in the crotch curve or length seem to have a big impact on fit!

 

With a much thicker ponti than first time around, I went up a size from the size my snug measurements indicated for the full length of the front leg pattern pieces and from the hips up on the back leg pattern pieces. The muscles in my front thighs get bigger when I run, but the muscles in my back thighs seem to stay kind of inconspicuous...

I also removed the tapering from around knee level down, and because I wanted cosy ankles (and don't we all?) I added about 10cm in length to the legs... not quite enough as it turns out, so I didn't hem them.

I cut the pattern pieces individually as they would wrap around my body so I could pattern match going around my body, starting at the back left side seam. The fabric matches pretty well on the centre back, right side seam, and centre front, and reasonably well on the inner leg seams, but mismatches on the left side seam:

Reasonable pattern matching over inner leg seams

When you've finally finished taking all your blog photos, then and only then can you sit down and relax!

Longer legs to cover ankles

Phew!

And in brief, the kids also each scored a last minute NZ merino wool top that they could layer over a thermal top for skiing days:
 

My son's top was drafted using a too-small size 6-8 RTW top for the sleeve and body widths (to make it really snug) and a too-big size 9 RTW top for the sleeve and body lengths, and uses slightly smaller bands around the wrists and neck (twin needle stitched at the neck). My daughter's top used a Burda pattern (which I am feeling too lazy to dig out), simple folded over fabric rather than bands at the wrists, and a band around the neck which is not twin needle stitched down.

Although I find Burda patterns to fit my kids really well, interestingly in this case I prefer the fit of the top that was made without a pattern - looks like my kids' shoulders are narrow - and I like the separate wrist bands on my son's top.

Both of these tops got worn on the coldest skiing day (the one where I had a skiing accident and hit my head on icy snow and may have had concussion, but that's a separate story), but apparently they're itchy and can't possibly be worn without thermals underneath. 

And so concludes the ski holiday sewing!  


See you soon,
  Gabrielle x