It's Polyester Pants time!

Yep, you read that right folks.
My next project (delaying my actual sewing for me! Which I will write about later) is a pair of 1970's polyester pants. Miss C is doing a project for school and needs a costume for it so .... here we go.

I'm going to be using a vintage pattern from a Golden Hands books, specifically this one. The pattern for the pants on the cover is included in the book.

I have a small collection of these 1970's Golden Hands books. They're kind of fun and luckily they all seem to have their sewing patterns still in them. Each issue had a free sewing pattern stapled to the middle of the book.

The pants are actually rather cool because they don't have a zipper front but instead one that buttons up, kind of like sailors pants. I don't remember having a pair of these but then I think I lived in jeans pretty much through the 70's. LOL

Here's another interesting feature of the pattern;

This is the whole pattern piece for the pant back. Not very long huh?

That's because part way down it says "Cut on this line and insert 18.5 inches".
I found that really interesting. I'm not sure if this was just to save paper or maybe to make the magazine less bulky...? No matter the reason it's neat. Naturally I didn't cut it there but rather traced the pattern to the size I needed and added the 18.5 inches while I was tracing.

So hopefully today I'll get everything cut out and the markings placed. Then it will be easy to get some little bits of sewing done during the week.
I find if I have everything cut out I can fit in 15 or 20 minutes of sewing during the week, but if I have to cut stuff out I stall until the weekend. Weird huh?
Well, off to continue working.

Ta!

It's now complete

We had a lovely weekend here and since sunny weekends seem to equal me wanting to sew I managed to turn a remnant into an apron for Miss S's costume so maybe people will stop telling her she's very "fancy".
shrug I know, I don't understand how a fairly plain dress with about $2 worth of trim can be fancy...but there you have it.

So this is (hopefully) the final costume for Miss S.
It dang well better be the final costume....the play is in 2 days!

Here's a quick snapshot of the gusset I did for the dancing.

Basically I opened up the arm hole seam up until ...the notches probably? Then I had Miss S put the dress on and raise her arms. I measured the gap that opened and made sure it was going to be enough and not put any strain on the arm hole. From there I just made this football shaped thing (cut on the bias for maximum stretch) that was the length of the portion of the seam I let out by the width of the gap created.
Pin, sew and done! FYI I sewed the gusset in by hand as I felt I'd have more control. I was right. If I was to do this again I would sew one side of the gusset down and then sew the sleeve in going across the gusset rather than the armhole. But of course I was doing this after so....hand sewing was easier.

Ta!