Like the matcha green shirt you saw earlier this week, this fabric was also a souvenir from the Atelier Brunette shop in Paris when we were there in February. I bought this 2.0m “Divine Parma” lavender cotton gabardine remnant for €32! This was an extra 30% off the already reduced remnant price, and it normally retails for £30/m, so I got quite the bargain on this.
I knew I wanted to make a pair of trousers with this fabric but I didn’t just want to default to the same TNT patterns I always use, so I had a browse through the past few years of Burda magazines that I couldn’t sew through while I was sick, and liked the look of Burda magazine 11/2024 no115.
It’s a little unusual in that the side seams are shifted forward, there are inseam pockets rather than jeans-style, and there’s waist edge facings rather than a traditional waistband. The hems are also deep, mid-calf faced bands instead of a traditional turn-and-stitch hem.
I sewed size 46 and lengthened the legs by 5cm below the knee so I could retain the bottom hem bands. This style is marked as being 7/8 length, and I needed a 73cm inseam vs the pattern’s 68cm inseam. This is a usual adjustment for me with Burda as I’ve got long legs, but usually I just add a bit onto the hems when I cut the fabric. To be honest, when I cut these out in March I probably was a size 46, but now that it’s May I think I’m closer to a 44 so these are looking a little big in the legs, especially when paired with the oversized matcha top…
The pattern calls for welt pockets in the back but I never really like those as much as jeans-style patch pockets, so I used the latter instead. I also wanted to make sure that I can wear these for the most amount of time without alterations while I’m still losing weight, so I opted to not sew the back darts (adjusting the Back Facing accordingly) and adding elastic between the Back and the Back Facing. I also cut the Back Facing with a CB seam instead of on the fold so that I can take them in easier at the CB seam when I eventually have to.
Burda’s order of construction was… a bit crazy (Sew the back pockets, then side seams, inseams, hem bands, facings, belt carriers, and THEN the fly front and buttonhole dead last?!). I prefer to assemble the backs, assemble the fronts (with the fly front constructed flat!), then the inseams then side seams before finishing the waist edge and hem bands.
When I got to attaching the facing, I realised I’d “done an Oopsie”. First of all, when I’d sewed the fly front I’d forgotten there wasn’t going to be a waistband attached, so I just left the standard 1.5cm above the zipper teeth. With no room above it for a button or hook & eye. Oops. So I had to creatively hand sew a hook and eye inside to try and take the strain off the zipper when worn.
The second issue was that the facing interfered with the top layer of the fly front, blocking the top 5cm of zipper teeth. Urgh. So I kinda fudged it by folding the facing away from the zipper teeth and topstitching again over by previous fly front stitching. It actually doesn’t look as bad as I feared, and the zipper pull can reach nearly up to the top, so it ended up okay.
I tried reading Burda’s fly front and facing instructions multiple times to try and figure out how they dealt with it but… they were absolutely incomprehensible. Like, I’m used to Burda having bad translations, but these are just badly written no matter what the language. When an experienced sewist is utterly baffled by what your intent even is, what hope does anyone else have?
In any case, I really like my finished trousers. The elasticated back waist should make them wearable for a long time, and the colour fits perfectly into my trouser palette alongside the blue-green Named Aina trousers and the khaki green KnipMode ones I made a few years ago that can finally fit into again. My beloved cycling jeans are still too tight to wear, and my barrel jeans were so big I couldn’t even cinch the waist anymore, so it’s nice that I have colourful trousers to wear while I’m jean-less.
It pairs perfectly with the matcha viscose I also bought at the same time, so they make a great outfit together! I wanted to show off the trousers on their own, too, though, so to my delight, they also match a Versatili-Top I sewed back in 2023 as well!
I technically still have one more dress left on my Spring Sewing Plan, but I think I’m going to park that for a few months because I’m really itching to sew up some of the fabrics from my IWTV props auction haul!