The Pomona Pants fail

I wrote recently about my Autumn/Winter sewing plans. I had two cuts of fabric I wanted to turn into trousers, a lightweight blue denim and a houndstooth wool. After some research, I settled on the Pomona Pants pattern, by Anna Allen Design. This is a real indie darling of the sewing world, with over 7600 hashtagged posts on Instagram. I loved the idea of the elasticated waist, I’m definitely in Camp Soft Trousers, getting changed into joggies the moment I cross the threshold of my flat. I wanted to sew some Hard/Soft Trousers, trousers that feel comfortable for lounging, whilst still looking stylish. I basically wanted to have my trouser cake and eat it too. 

As you can see, the resultant trousers are underwhelming, I feel like an extra from Peaky Blinders. All I need is a pair of braces, a flat cap with a razor tucked inside and a grubby, button up shirt to complete the look. I started with the blue denim, since I have a lot of denim in my stash. This was an off cut from another project, which effectively limited its use anyway, making it the perfect wearable toile materal. I had to make a decent amount of adjustments to this version, to the point where I question whether this is the right pattern for my body shape. I’m quite short, 5 feet tall, meaning I ended up taking 2 inches out of the rise. There was just so much fabric pooling in the crotch, it looked ridiculous when I sat down. It’s my bad for not measuring the rise on the pattern piece before I started. The pattern pieces are a non-traditional shape for a pair of trousers. Instead of a front and back leg as separate patterns, plus the waist band, you have one pattern piece for all three. The fabric then wraps around the outer leg, creating just one seam that runs up the inside leg, round the crotch and down the other inside leg. Next you fold the waistband over and insert the elastic. You can see in the photo below, there’s no outside leg seam. This slightly confused me when I was cutting out, meaning I forgot to do things like measuring the rise. 

Luckily for me (sarcasm, rolls eyes) I had already hacked the pattern to add side pockets, which made removing 2 inches from the crotch length trickier than necessary. I used this tutorial from Seamwork, to add slanted side pockets. You add them first to the front trouser pattern piece, bearing in mind in this pattern, the waistband is also integrated into the pattern pieces. You fold the waistband down once the inside seam is sewn, so you need to position your new pockets far enough down the pattern piece to avoid them being folded into the waistband. I had sewn on the pockets, including topstitching, when I realised the crotch issue.

To solve this problem (bearing in mind these were supposed to be a wearable toile), I ripped back the pocket to the level of the crotch length adjustment line, removed two inches from the crotch (just a simple two vertical cuts across the entire width of the trousers), then sewed the whole thing back together. I pressed my new vertical crotch line flat, then topstitched to make it look intentional. You can see in the photos, this created an X marks the spot situation right over the crotch and bum, but I don’t think it would have been a deal breaker honestly. I then resewed the pockets down, covering the majority of this new vertical line from the front of the trousers.

The only other pattern piece is for the back patch pockets. These nicely cover my botched crotch line, as well as being functional pockets. I experimented with the snugness of the waist elastic, trying to find that sweet spot between them being tight enough not to fall down but still be comfortable. It took a couple of attempts, the looser settings definitely added to the crotch issue by allowing the whole trousers to sit lower on my hips than the pattern designer intends.

To try to solve the fabric pooling issue, I went back to the crotch curve and removed a section of fabric to create a J shaped curve. I read this blog post from Lladybird (dating from 2014!) years ago and have applied it to multiple trouser projects since then. It definitely improved the fit in the crotch, but by this time I had run out of steam on this project. 

I don’t know if it’s the pattern design not suiting my body shape, or my fit issues by not adjusting the crotch length, but the Pomona pants are not for me. At least not for right now, perhaps in the future when I have more fitting skills in my tool kit. In the meantime, I’m going to try the Modern Sewing Company Worker Trousers instead. They’re not quite the Hard/Soft trousers I was aiming for, but I think they’ll suit the houndstooth wool best. I’m brewing on an idea to thrift some cashmere to make a cashmere loungewear set so I’ll return to the idea of Soft Trousers in the future.