Sisterly Sew-a-long: Pleated Shorts

Papercut Patterns - Pleated Shorts 1007

Bernice: worn with Vogue 1247 blogged here

Katherine: worn with cowl-necked top blogged here

A few weeks ago I travelled down to Townsville to spend some quality (sewing) time with my sister Katherine of Bloom's Fabric Obsession before she moves away from North Queensland. Katherine and I have lived within a five hour drive of each other for about the past 15 years. This may still seem like quite a distance, but compared to our other siblings and family, it's a mere hop, skip and jump. Five hours is still close enough to catch up on long weekends and school holidays. Anyway, she's about to move to Gove...go on look it up...did you look it up?...I know!...sniff, sniff.

She suggested that we do a sew-a-long while I was there. During this year, she has purchased quite a few Papercut Patterns and was keen to give the 1007 Pleated Shorts a whirl. By coincidence, we both had a length of blue Karen Walker denim purchased from The Fabric Store in Brisbane. We used blue topstitching thread where required.

We each began by making up a toile. We both found that the sizes ran quite big. I cut a M-L but ended up removing 1.5 cm from each side seam (6 cm in total). I also found that the pants sat quite high creating a frumpy and unflattering silhouette on my shape. I decided to keep the depth of the waistband, but removed fabric from the top of the shorts. The photo below shows the unaltered paper pattern of a M-L. The orange line shows the top of my shorts, seam allowances included. 

Angled view

As you can see from these photos, there appears to be a bit of pooling at the CF. I did remove some fabric from this area. The fabric we used was quite stiff. This has settled down now the shorts have had a few washes. I think I will still remove some fabric from this area on my next pair.

Front

From memory, I lengthened my shorts by about five centimetres. I also created a deeper hem. Given this, they may be about 2 centimetres longer than the original design.

Side

Overall, I am quite happy with these shorts. They're comfortable and coordinate well with a range of tops I already own which makes them all the more wearable. I'll definitely give this pattern another go.

Check out Katherine's pleated shorts here!