17oz black selvedge denim jeans
After not sewing a pair of jeans in a year and a half, I decided to make a pair of pants. I made this pair from 17oz 100% cotton black selvedge denim from Okayama, but I don’t know the actual mill. I got the denim from Kofuya off of Etsy. This denim is quite slubby which I didn’t realize until I got the fabric in hand, but it was a nice detail. I wanted to add some black buttons and rivets but didn’t have any so I had to just use some spare gold and silver hardware. Moving forward, I don’t think I will sew with anything over 14-15oz anytime soon as the weight of this fabric made me want to rip my hair out. There are some portions of the pants where I can definitely improve upon, but nothing majorly terrible, and most of these problems should be mitigated with sewing lighter fabric.
The waistband, I was using a new technique I saw on my professionally made jeans to close the waistband, and hope to improve this as I keep using it. It resulted in some raw edges to be exposed as seen here.
Raw edges poking out of the bottom of the waistband
The bartack on the fly, my machine’s foot wouldn’t lift high enough so I had to end up seam ripping and sewing the bartack 3 times as the fabric layers were shifting when I tried to shove it under the machine's foot. In this process I accidentally seam ripped a thread holding a portion of the fly together, so I had to use an extra long bartack to fix this. This was the reason I didn’t use a bartack on the belt loops but rather really small tight straight stitches.
Long bartack on fly
The back, the flat felled seams are slightly miss aligned as I didn’t offset them enough before sewing.
Slightly misaligned flat felled seam on back
I patterned these jeans myself off of a pair of Samurai jeans that I own, and I would say these pants are a straight cut but are probably leaning more slim straight. This pattern took me four tries. My first attempt was actually fairly close but I still wanted to fix some things, so in the second draft I fixed some measurements and changed some issues with the knee angles. I realized in this draft that the jeans needed darts. In the third draft I added darts and tried another knee angle tweak, just to see if I could get the knee angle any better, though it was already pretty decent. I realized that the knee angle tweak actually made it slightly worse, and the dart was too wide. So in the final fourth draft I made the dart slightly smaller and changed the knee angle.
Before hemming I gave these a cold wash along with an air dry. I did this because I have no intention of trying to fade these and wanted to take some of the starch out of the jeans. Overall this pair of pants is pretty basic, having a 5 pocket construction with a special detail of exposed selvedge belt loops.
