Trousers from a cotton fabric with very small blue stripes

Summertime, and the livin' is easy..... Our small city garden has a lot of flowers. The pictures suggest we only have yellow blossoming ones, yellow loosestrife to be exact, but we also have a lot of red and pink roses, nasturtium (indian cress) in various colors, and this year, suddenly, a lot of ferns.

Just before summer finally began this year, I made some new summer wear. My newest production is a pair of trousers, made from a cotton fabric with very small blue stripes, so small that on the pictures the pants seem to be light blue. 

This fabric was available in a fabric store we discovered when scouting the old centre of the small community of Breukelen, south of Amsterdam.

Located in a small street, the shop "De strekkende meter" (something like "the stretching meter"....) offers a nice selection of various fine fabrics and accessory supplies for people who like to sew there own clothes.

These pants have been cut as a jeans model, two front pockets, no money pocket, two back pockets with flaps, jeans buttons.

Guess I looked around enough in the garden, better go inside now, to do some cooking for tonight's dinner on the terrace. 

The pictures in this post have been printed in a format such as years ago pictures came out of a Polaroid camera. A bit of nostalgia..... 

Khaki trousers

Above picture, taken early june during an outing, shows me, for the first time wearing my new khaki trousers.

I very much like this picture, made by my partner, beacuse it has a special atmosphere, part is in focus and part is vague, and this has not been done by using photoshop. Wow !

The trousers have been made from a khaki cotton fabric, on sale on a nearby market at a very reduced price. It's a jeans model, five pockets, rivets added..

The seam at the outside part of the legs has got a special treat: one of the seam allowances of some 2 cm (0.8 inches) has been cut off in the lenght, the other part is folded double in the length and is tucked such that it covers the flipped part. 

Use your iron ! And use pins on the good side of the fabric to keep the folded seam allowance in place.

From the good side of the fabric the folded seam allowance is top stitched along the width of the presser foot of the sewing machine. 

You can use yarn with a contrasting color, if you like so, and you can also make a double stitching by repeating the process, having set the needle a little off center, a device most sewing machines will offer.

Take care that topstitching is done on the side of the rear legs of the trousers, unless you want to topstitch through your front pockets

Dark blue denim pants (the buttons)

 

In an earlier post of february 2011 I complained that I had problems in coming along a nice blue denim fabric. So I was rather happy when strolling the friday market of Amstelveen, a city adjacent to Amsterdam, I came along a seller who had a small quantity of dark blue denim in stock.

I made a pair of jeans from this fabric, using the pattern I have described before, so I will not elaborate on this here.

Here I just would like to show the nice buttons I applied to this sewing.

For the fly I used jeans buttons with kind of a rose centerpiece, items that are not visible from the outside, however, so it's only me who knows about them (and those few people who happen to read this, of course)
 

And for the backside pockets I had some very nice shining jeans buttons, which certainly can be noticed by people around, if they would care to be interested in taking notice of such items, quod non, generally speaking.

Maybe this is just the appropriate moment to make a referral to a colleague blogger from New York, who writes about sewing men's wear and who wrote kind of tutorial how to sew a pair of jeans. The blog is called Male Pattern Boldness and the series starts at May 2, 2011. Take a look.

A pair of trousers for next spring

Recently I made that flowery shirt for next spring and I considered I would have to make light blue denim pants, to have a nice combination with this shirt.

I went shopping on my favourite Dappermarkt, but I couldn't find any denim.
So I came home with another light blue fabric, which would be nice to combine with the shirt. (By the way, I had to pay four euro for two meters of the fabric, can you believe this? The buttons are more expensive than the fabric...)

This time I wanted to make a jeans type model.
 
In terms of fabric, jeans are made from denim.

In terms of design, the main features of a jeans model are 1) the typical front pockets and 2) the typical two separate parts topping the rear legs.  Both elements are shown in above picture.

Well, maybe the rivets and the buttons which were functional and not decorative when jeans originally were introduced as workman clothes, form another characteristic.
 
But all other elements (the "fifth pocket", all kind of colored stichtings, wide legs, small legs)  in my opinion are decoration, fantasy, fashion, whatever.

I learned about a London designer who recently presented male fashion with very wide legs, say  five times the usual size. But I also understand skinny legs will be hot next season.

Variations on the same theme.

I will stick to my basic model with legs which are not too wide, not too skinny. And I just will have some variations by decorative topstitching with yarn in a different color.
 
The next picture shows what the trousers look like when completed with silvery (jeans) buttons and a belt that goes very fine with the decorative stichtings..

Of course I still am looking around for my light blue denim fabric.

However, it is not so easy to find it, even in the best fabric shops in town, as if the leading jeans manufacturers monopolize the really nice denim fabrics.