From wide trousers to narrow stretch ones – pattern modification

Previously I drafted a trouser sloper and now I am using it to make a pair of narrow trousers out of stretch cotton satin fabric.

The first thing I needed to determine was how wide I wanted the trousers to be. I did not want super skinny trousers so I measured the circumference of my calf and added about 2 cm to it. This meant I had to remove about 2 cm from the width from each side of the trouser sloper I had.

The fabric that I chose for these narrow trousers was green stretch cotton satin that I got from Marimekko outlet a while ago. Because of the stretch I also had to take a little of the hips. I determined the amount by pinning the extra fabric from the side seams while wearing the trousers. I also noticed that there was a bit extra at the centre back and I took that off, too. However, my careful work with the sloper paid off since the crotch still fitted beautifully.

In the picture below the red line shows the original sloper I had with the seam allowance removed for clarity. The Black line shows my original modification (I’ll explain the blue later).

Then I had to tackle the extra amount of fabric at the back of my thighs. Now it is time to do the fish-eye reduction I talked about in my previous post. I pinned a vertical dart starting below my bum and ending a bit above my knee:

I marked this dart using a magic marker on the fabric and on my pattern. This is the blue vertical dart in the schematic picture. Then I took away the amount of the fabric in the dart from the sides of the pattern. It helps a lot to draw horizontal guide lines like the dotted blue lines in the picture.

Now I was happy with the overall shape and the only thing to do was to add the facings, zipper and to hem the pants. After some ironing the end results looks like this:

… and from the back:

I noticed that my Lekala blouse goes well with the green in these trousers!

I am pretty happy with this pair. The only thing I wish I had remembered is to curve the top of the front pattern a bit more to remove the slight wrinkling on the both sides of the centre front. This seems to be something I always forget in my hurry to finish up the project!

Anyway, I have a lot of fabric waiting for to be turned into trousers. Now that I have a pattern for the narrow ones I can start adding pockets and other details.

I hope this post was helpful to you! Happy sewing!

Katja