Busy hands | Disquiet mind

A while back I had an idea; "Very late pandemic meets teetering on the edge of another world war, and leaving the house is increasingly difficult." Which translates to a combat/cargo trousers amount of pockets, a punky/gothy number of superfluous bondage straps, but make it pandemic formal.

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Finished Mel joggers, front view
Photo by chebe

I finally got around to making another version of Seamwork's Mel joggers. Last time I didn't expect them to turn out so well, so I skipped a few steps (like using matching thread). This time I did everything as specified.

Same size 18 as before, I didn't adjust the length, but I did add 2" to the width of each of the ankles (tapered from the calves) for comfort.

I used this lovely dark purple fabric. I can't find the receipt, so I don't know the fibre content of the material, but it's a kind of sweatshirt fabric, and is fuzzy on the inside. Probably polyester, possibly poly-cotton, with some elastane. The thread is a perfect match, and is Gütermann thread colour 257.

This pattern mostly wants you to serge/overlock all the seams. At some point I realised they probably mean a 4-thread serge/overlock stitch. I have my machine set up in 3-thread arrangement, for seam finishing, and by the fact that all my serging/overlocking uses black thread, you might have noticed that I try not to change things unless I have to. So for the centre-front and centre-back seams I stitched two lines of narrow zigzag before finishing the seams in the serger/overlocker. For the in-seam I ran one line of narrow zigzag, but around the crotch area added a second line of narrow zigzag, for reinforcement, before serging/overlocking. I also added one line of narrow zigzag to the waistband seam and cuffs, before serging/overlocking. The rest were just serged/overlocked.

I used some scrap poly-cotton woven instead of interfacing to reinforce the fabric when adding buttonholes for the drawstring channel, and it worked really well. Running the two lines of narrow zigzags around the waistband is hard on the hands. I needed to not only use two hands to hold the fabric, but also to stretch the elastic and keep it all under tension and flat. Twice. Ouch. But seeing how badly the elastic held up in the first version I knew I had to do it. (And after this I did the same to version 1, definitely an improvement.) It took me a moment to figure out how to do it well, so the distribution of the fullness of the fabric on the front waistband is not great. (The camera also really didn't want to focus on this colour, so apologies for the blurriness.)

It fits easily, like the previous version. The extra looseness is allowing the legs to ride up more, so it's either reduce some of the width I added to the ankles, or add some to the length in the legs. The thread where the pockets meet the side-seams is coming loose too, so will reinforce that next time.

Finished Mel joggers
Photo by chebe