African Wax Pietra shorts

Jul 14

Jul 14 African Wax Pietra shorts

Hot on the heels of my first pair, another pair of Pietra shorts. I cut these out as soon as I had finished my first pair, there is something about the pattern that invites colour blocking and I thought it would be perfect for these African wax remnants I had left over, with the pocket wedge and waistband one print and everything else in the other print.

Unfortunately 'as soon as I finished the other ones' meant before I had done the adjustment on the rise. I didn't have any fabric left to recut the front pieces as I would have needed, cue some very fudgey fitting adjustments here.

Read below!

Pattern: Closter Core Pietre pants, view C

Size: 16. I am now coming to the conclusion that a 14 with a bigger bum adjustment would be better

Fabric: African Wax remnants from my two Dovetailed projects. It’s the classic stuff African Wax fabric.

Adjustments: 1 inch full seat adjustment as before. Made the elastic slightly (2cms) shorter than it said.

And then the front rise adjustment saga: I'd taken out 6cms in the other pair, and that seemed pretty perfect. If you did this adjustment properly you would take out a wedge on the inside of the pattern piece only. This leaves the outer edge of the pattern piece slightly curvy. (In an ideal world you would probably want to transfer that curving onto the piece with the pocket, but that's too complicated for my brain, so let's ignore that.) The problem as mentioned above is that I’d already cut the pieces out and didn’t have any fabric left to recut.

This is what the adjusted piece looks like, next to the already cut piece, I drew on where I eventually cut the wedge out, just 4cms as I was cautious, which was the right thing to do.

This did not work particularly well and I ended up with a somewhat ridiculous looking waist:

To address this, I ended up narrowing the seam allowance in the slanty bit to 0.7cms (yay for 1.5cm seam allowances), making the overall reduction only just over half of what it was supposed to be, but giving a not completely quite as mad looking waist. I do think overall the rise is definitely still too long, but it feels like an ok compromise given I couldn’t do it properly.