I was about to begin making my Ginger jeans when Archie asked me to make him a white denim pair and he wanted my best work (the cheek!). Naturally I didn’t have any white denim in my stash, so set about sourcing some. Easier said than done. I dragged him to Knitwit but he didn’t like their offerings, and then I found some at Tessuti. It just so happened that Mark was going to Melbourne so he was despatched on a fabric buying mission, which he accomplished magnificently.

I used KwikSew 3504 and I had my doubts that I could make these rather pedestrian jeans fashionable enough for Archie.

I intended to roughly sew them together to fit them to him, but it all got too hard, so I just made them with a couple of fittings and they fit ok – although it doesn’t look like it here, but that’s because he’s got them pulled down.

They had to be skinny jeans so I overlaid the pattern with a RTW pair and reduced the width of the legs.  

and the obligatory back view which doesn’t actually show anything!

The coin pocket and the back pockets have rivets, which Archie did very expertly, and then we had to find a button. I found the perfect one, but he objected to the fact that it had “Pumpkin Patch” written on it, so I had to dig a bit deeper. We got there in the end! The zip was stashbusted because I forgot to buy one and I was busy doing this on Sunday. I found this zip which my mother must have taken out of my jeans in the ’70s!

So a bit of unpicking required, but the zip worked brilliantly.

I had a lot of trouble with the topstitching thread. I tried my Singer, practising on another make. In fact, Archie is so taken with my Singer Featherweight that he immediately had to use it. It’s wonderful because he’s happy to clean and oil the machine, which I appreciate as it has to be taken apart every time it gets done.

Oh, I do like to see a grown man sew.

Anyway, I moved to my Elna Lotus because it normally enjoys topstitching, but not this time. In the end I dug around in my stash and found some thicker thread which wasn’t topstitching. The spool doesn’t identify what sort of thread it is, but it worked perfectly.

I wanted to lay the jeans flat for shots of my top stitching and his riveting, but he wouldn’t take them off. In fact, I’m not sure he’s had them off since I finished them!

Details: Pattern is Kwik Sew 3504, fabric is white denim with 2% spandex from Tessuti, Sydney. All other elements were stashbusted. Headless model is Archie – he insisted on no head shots, so that’s what he got.