Dawn jeans

I have been eying the Dawn jeans pattern – I have made several stretch jeans, and one attempt in rigid denim, the Morgan jeans. I never achieved a decent fit in them (or any other rigid pants, as all my fitting posts clearly shows), so I gave up in the end.

I chose a nice mid weight navy twill for these, no stretch. I fell between sizes, a size 6 waist and size 12 hip. I cut the size 14 all over, as I could see from other reviews that they are a bit tight, and also to have more room for fitting changes.

Alas, first pair, the fit was horrible, lots of the dreaded back thigh pooling and strange pooling under the butt, as usual. I felt so frustrated that I cannot get a decent fit in pants unless I “cheat” and use stretch fabric. I don’t have a photo of my first muslin, this one is a bit better but still not there:

So, I Googled (again), and this time I found a blog called handmade phd, and her fit issues were very similar to mine! (I would link to the post, but only a few days after I discovered her blog, she closed both her blog and her Instagram account). I read and read, and started to do similar adjustment to my Dawn pattern. Most importantly her change was to shift the top of the pattern, so the angle between hip and legs change.

I applied these changes to my Dawn pattern, you can see how the hip part has shifted:

I then recognised that this shape very much looks like the Tierra joggers and the Liana stretch pants (from Itch to Stitch), that by far are my best fitting pant patterns. I have altered these patterns very much back when I was pretty new at pattern fitting, and had since discarded these changes, as they seem absolutely bonkers and make the pattern pieces look “wrong”. But, maybe they are not! Maybe the tilt in my pelvis is just so pronounced that this shift in the top part of the pattern is necessary to avoid pooling of fabric on my back thighs.

I sewed the Dawns up from my new pattern pieces, view C, the length is the tall cropped version (I am 178 cm/ 5’10). And, hooray, the back thigh pooling is almost gone! If I was in a store to buy pants I would surely buy these! Also, I very much like the more relaxed fit around the hip from going up a size. (Just a note: I did other changes as well, sway back, low butt, changing the placement of the back pockets etc; I did these while sewing, tracing the changes to my pattern pieces as I went along).

I ended up sewing these in a different order than suggested in the pattern; eg making the pockets before the zipper, and adding interfacing to fly and fly extension etc.

One of my favourite things of me-made jeans are the choice of fabric for the pocket bags. No one can see it, but I know!

The pattern itself is very nice – the instructions are thorough with drawings, there are several options for fly etc. The only thing that annoyed me is that the PDF pattern is not layered. This means that you cannot choose the siz(s) you want to print, but all sizes are printed, making it very difficult to cut exactly where the line is.

The grey top I am wearing is my muslin of the Kila tank from Allie Olson.

I am so happy, and I am now working on the stovepipe version, planning to make a black denim pair when I get the fit perfect.

When I searched the Dawns before sewing them, I could not find these two views, so here you go: