Mirroring Suzy Bee Sews - Life So Strange It Should Be Fiction

So you may be thinking you have seen these before , same fabric, same notions and pattern! A couple of changes though, wider leg pattern and the waistband. I've had a lot of trouble with my pants waistbands stretching out while wearing and have tried stay tape but that can make the pants a bit too tight to sit in comfortably. So these pants have elastic in the waistband, very similar to this tutorial by Debbie Cook which she credits back to Sandra Betzina. I changed it slightly by making the pants to fit my waist when I'm sitting down and adding the elastic to fit when I'm standing up. So when I'm wearing them they have a mostly smooth waistband that stretches a couple of inches when I sit down (which is great if your waist measurement changes by about 3" when you sit down like mine does!) The only elastic I had in a similar width was about 1/2" thinner than the waistband so I'm not sure how it will wash, it might need to be tacked down ...

  Ginger shorts (jorts?). My daughter has a pair of piping hot shorts that has some design features that I wanted to copy, they have bright pink serging that's exposed with the cuff turned up plus a bright pink topstitched back pockets. I tried to get the same feel with these shorts but I don't think I went quite far enough and the single topstitched back pocket just looks odd to me now.   Nothing new fit wise (same as the last pair of jeans , I did notice excess on the side of my leg that didn't show up in my jeans so I've adjusted the pattern for next time.   The fabric was a remnant scrap from a garage sale, just managed to squeeze the shorts out of it and the pocket bags are a quilting cotton from my stash.   

Most of my biking is casual city biking for transportation.  I am in a skirt or dress 95% of the time in winter and 100% of the time in summer.  To keep the creepers slightly at bay (people still try to stare up your skirt, no matter what, ugh), I always have something on underneath, usually bike shorts.  Bike shorts are fine for winter, but for summer when every little bit of extra clothing counts, I've been wanting to make bloomers.  I finally got around to them for the Seersucker Social , woot! I remembered seeing an elastic waist short pattern recently so I pulled out Burda 03-2012-114 (available for download from BurdaStyle at the link).  They would require a little redrafting because the front laps over the back to create a petal-effect at the side hem, while I just wanted a plain side seam. So I compared the pattern pieces with Burda 06-2011-111 (you have to scroll through to get to the shorts in the German Burda archive, f you very much BurdaStyle), w...

I have not owned shorts for many years. I mean, I have the old denim shorts I use for painting and really dirty chores, but nothing I'd wear in public. Even my exercise shorts are years out of date and therefore worn only in extremely dire (90+ degrees) circumstances. But when I planned a hiking vacation, I figured it was finally time to bit the bullet. I knew Burda had been publishing some cute shorts styles, so I went through back issues and found Burda 06-2011-111 in the Brigitte Bardot feature. While shorts are not the first thing that come to me when I think of Ms. Bardot, these are nice shorts. I like the side zip (no scary fly situation), back darts, and front released darts. Pleated pants are always a gamble, but in this case that front released dart is small and looks nice rather than Mom Jeans. I cut the shorts straight off the pattern sheet in a 36 at the waist and a 38 at the hip with no alterations other than lengthening. The inseam is meant to be 4 inches; mi...