I’ve still got lots of holiday sewing to tell you about and today I wanted to focus on three pairs of our Lightspeed Leggings I made for Christmas gifts!
A good friend of ours spent Christmas with us this year, and seeing as how he’d helped me with the early development of the Lightspeed Leggings pattern I’d promised him a finished pair of shorts. On one of his visits months ago he’d picked out the remains of the houndstooth lycra (as seen modeled by Jason on the pattern cover), but when I went to cut it, I discovered there wasn’t enough! Boo.
As is typical for me, working within restraints often results in better designs than if I’m given free creative reign – so I decided to “make it work” and still give my friend the houndstooth running shorts he wanted, but with a curved piece of rust-coloured supplex at the bottom of the leg to make up the correct length. Since there are no side seams I was able to make a nice, smooth curve around the leg and I think the finished shorts are even better for it! (And more importantly, so does he!)
I also made him a second pair in some Funkifabrics “Beam bright” flexcite from my stash as a laugh, sewing both in tandem, production-line style. It’s amazing how quickly you can make multiple pairs when you don’t have to keep switching threads (though I did switch to orange for the zipper topstitching on the Beam pair).
Both pairs of shorts have the back zippered pockets – he’s a runner (as well as a climber, kite-racer, and occasional cyclist) and loves having easy access to his phone. You can also thank him for the perfect pocket placement on the Lightspeed Leggings pattern – early versions had the pocket too low and it was his telling me it got in the way when he sat that resulted in the improved placement!
Best of all – not only is he wearing these for running and cycling, but he also says these are so comfortable that he’s been wearing them as a base layer under jeans!
I also sneakily bought James some of Funkifabrics’ new Police Line Tape design on their heftier Titan base in the leadup to the holidays. James loves everything Police Line Tape so when they announced this one I knew I’d have to make him some cycling leggings!
I made his pair of Lightspeed Leggings with his (now usual) lengthened front crotch adjustment and slightly shortened legs. He’s a cyclist so never uses pockets in his leggings or shorts, but I added in a chamois from funfabrics.de after they were completely done (you can see in the detail photos that they still need their second line of edge stitching, but I was awaiting his feedback on the placement when these photos were taken!).
I’m interested to see whether this print in particular makes him more visible to drivers, in that sub-conscious way that wearing the hi-vis “Polite notice” vests that look like Police vests do!
And as a bit of a bonus, I’m going to throw in a photo of these navy and red quilted jersey True Bias Hudson pants I also made James for a Christmas present.
Truth be told, this is actually the second pair I made him – he got a navy quilted pair last year for Christmas, but despite wearing them nonstop every weekend, I failed to get any decent photos or properly blog about them. But he wears them so much and they’re so easy and quick to sew, he got another pair this year. Even if my “I only have 0.5m of the red quilted jersey” leg piecing does result in an Accidental Spiderman. 😂