I had one of those weekends where I seemed to be in a whirl. Tom and Bridgette left for their European odyssey, so we are now officially child free (although we do have my father). I am off to Fiji tomorrow (for work, so little pleasure to be had), so I had to get organised for that, and then I needed to sew something, anything!

I received some ordered patterns in the post; among them was Vogue 8859, a close fitting pants pattern with an elastic waist and pockets on the back.

What is nice is that they have a detail on the knee in the form of two pleats, and I thought they would be just the thing for a quick stashbust. I dragged out some brown stretch fabric and cut out the pattern.The back is in two sections, joined at the knee and the top back is cut across the grain, which intrigued me. I read several reviews which said that they did not finish up with a skinny fit. I thought I could live with this as long as they were fitted around the top. I chose to make the smallest size, but stressed about this decision the whole time I was sewing. I did keep reminding myself that when I make the correct size I seem to spend a lot of time taking in the seams.

I decided to keep the pockets on the back as an interesting detail, but was absolutely determined to get them perfect, including the topstitching. I’ve read on several blogs that the way to get pockets perfect is to make a template and form the pocket around it. I can’t find any of these blogs now to give proper attribution, so apologies, but I will explain the process. I cut a template from a piece of card and took off the seam allowance. I then sticky taped the pocket to this template

I pressed this well and then carefully eased the cardboard from the pocket, using the sticky tape to keep the shape. I then carefully pinned and topstitched them on. I was pretty happy with the result (although I spent the day picking sticky tape out of the pockets!).

Then came the pleats in the legs. There are three variations but I either didn’t like them (part sewing across the leg, leaving a baggy bit in the middle – very unattractive), or couldn’t follow the instructions, so I did my own thing, which was to create two simple pleats and top stitch them down. They actually look just like the picture above, so perhaps I got it right.

As you can see, they fitted me, and pretty closely. I am very happy with everything about them (except the way the pleats on the front knee lined up with the seam on the back – I will modify this for the next pair). They are really comfortable to wear and I think they look just like the pattern photo. Examining these photos, I think that I have made the elastic a little tight creating those caterpillar sides!

I am now planning my next pair, or two.

My other activity was to finally empty the cupboard in my study  sweatshop.  It completes the transition from a place of study and scholarly activity to a place of creative activity. These are the books I am recycling. I distributed a few around the house, the rest have been disposed of. Not a bad haul.

and this is what my cupboard now looks like

I only discovered one piece of fabric that I have no memory of – a lovely piece of silk chiffon. I think I can live out of this cupboard for the next few years – keeping in mind this is just my fabric, the other side of the room contains my yarn stash!

An update on GCC:

Friday: 21,292 (ok)

Saturday: 32,076 (a new PB)

Average: 23,949