Helen's Closet Avery Leggings

My first make of 2025, actually started in December last year but after the holidays, we had about a month where the room I usually sew in was full of boxes and furniture, so I only just managed to pick it up again. Anyway…

These leggings are the Helen’s Closet Averys. I’ve previously (years ago) made three of these and I wear them all the time, and now two of them are slightly starting to wear out, so it was time for a new pair. Luckily, Minerva have extended their Minerva Exclusive range to include some activewear Lycra now. I picked this lovely celestial print. The fabric is a bit heavier and shinier than the ones I’ve used before, so these leggings feel very supportive. I’d say this is definitely a fabric for exercise leggings, not lounging about in ones.

It’s been such a long time since I last made these, I had to go back to the instructions to see what was going on. They’re really well written and detailed, as always with Helen’s Closet. The only thing I had an issue with was attaching the elastic into the waistband. The instructions include adding a very slight (1/8th inch) offset between the waistband and the waistband facing, so that the seam sits on the inside rather than the top. But its really hard to keep it to such a small width of a slinky fabric, so my offset was larger, and then trying to align the elastic to the lower bit added more width. In the end, the waistband and waistband facing, which are meant to align at the bottom once the elastic is in, were about 3cm off. I ended up just cutting it off to match. Luckily I made the high waistband option which is *very* high, so narrowing the waistband slightly was actually a good result.