Search Results for: the ny lon jeans

The NY-Lon jeans

Why “NY-Lon” jeans? Well, it’s certainly not because they’re made of nylon fabric!! (ewww) I’m calling these that because I bought this denim at Mood in NYC on our honeymoon, and the lining pieces are London streetsigns fabric, bought as an eco reusable wrapping paper! So they’re New York and London together!

Once again, these are made using the Jalie 2908 jeans pattern. The first Jalie jeans taught me that, overall, the fit was great, but the waistband was an utter horror.

So I made two small but significant improvements to these, and I am SUPER happy with the result!

  1. I ditched Jalie’s awful straight, bias, uninterfaced waistband and used the curved waistband from my favourite Burda August 2006 trousers/jeans, which I also interfaced. I used the London street sign cotton as the inner waistband (as well as the fly underlap and the pocket linings).

  2. I extended my pocket linings to the centre front so they got caught in the fly front stitching and reinforced the front over my gut (you do NOT want stretch denim stretching out there when you sit – it’s not pretty!)

An all black pair of Duathlon Shorts

Ever since I made my pair of (nearly) all black Tenacity Leggings, I’ve wanted a similar pair of shorts. I’m not one to shy away from plain fabrics, but to me, entirely black leggings and shorts are just SO boring! But since making the leggings, I realised how incredibly useful they are for cycling around town, meeting people for pub garden drinks, running errands, getting to hospital appointments, etc when you want to be comfortable on the ride yet blend in when you get to your destination (and it’s too wet to wear cycling jeans).

And I needed something similar for the warmer months! So I took the same black supplex from Tia Knight out of my stash and decided to make a pair of Duathlon Shorts (biker length) so I could have easy access pockets, too. This particular supplex is currently out of stock but keep an eye on their socials because when they restock it, it sells out super quick because it’s such great quality and ridiculously cheap!

Twin pairs of cycling jeans

I’ve been sewing my own jeans for something like twelve(?) years now. Over the years I’ve built up my own preferences in how I like to construct them, but also how I like to wear them. And since I took up cycle commuting a few years ago, I really dig the ability to, you know, move in my jeans. I love know I can hop on a bike or break into a run at any time and my clothing isn’t going to slow me down (which also cuts down on the amount of clothing I have to haul in to the office!).

So I started making adaptations to my standard jeans pattern (which at one point started life as a Burda mag pattern but has morphed so many times it’s probably more accurate to just call it self drafted) to make them easier to cycle in (more on this later). By my count, these two are my 4th and 5th pairs of cycling jeans building on the ones from…

Another pair of cycling jeans

I’ve made a lot of jeans since I started sewing 14 years ago. I remember I made my first pair before we even bought the boat, which would put them back in 2006 or 2007, and I really haven’t stopped since! I’ve probably made at least 10-15 pairs over the years, with various patterns and weights of denim, but my most recent pair with cycling-specific adaptations have been one of my favourites, so I wanted to have another pair of those in my wardrobe.

The majority of my jeans over the years have been made with Ditto Fabrics’ super freaking amazing Italian denims, and this traditional, non-stretch, dark dye was bought when I last visited their shop in December. It’s no coincidence that we’ve got another trip to Brighton planned in a few weeks so I can restock then…

Sewing jeans against the world

Sometimes you have to just close yourself into your sewing room, try to block out the world, and just make. This weekend I closed myself in my sewing cave and emerged on Sunday with a new pair of jeans and a teeshirt.

Let’s start with the jeans – I’ve lost track, but these are probably at least the 10-15th pair of jeans I’ve sewn myself, so I pretty much know what I want and how to achieve it by now. I usually try to make at least a pair a year, as they seem to live for just over a year of hard wear before the inner thighs inevitably start to wear thin and they’re relegated into “boat work jeans”.

Parisian jeans and a geometric Wiksten tee

As some of you may have guessed from my FW2012 shortlist I posted yesterday, I’ve made the Wiksten tank, using the pattern and geometric Mood jersey Kollabora gifted me and also another pair of Jalie jeans! I wasn’t actually planning that they’d go together, but they were a perfect pairing for a relaxed Sunday roast at a cosy pub near the moorings.

Let’s start with the jeans – as I said earlier, my NY-Lon jeans are easily my most-worn item of clothing ever since I made them last year, but they’re starting to fade and I want to have a replacement pair ready before they totally die. The denim I used there was from Mood in NYC, but I’d found some great stretch denim at the Tissues Dreyfus coupon shop in Paris in March, and only €10 for a 3m length, too. I wouldn’t normally buy that much of the same fabric if given a choice, but it means that I’ve got enough left over to easily make another pair. I find it really difficult to find good stretch denim in shops, but this has good stretch and recovery without being too flimsy, so I snapped it up when I saw it.

I constructed these exactly the same as my NY-Lon jeans – again, my main deviations from the Jalie pattern were to use a Burda curved waistband (instead of their rectangular, bias-cut waistband that was just awful in my muslin pair), and extended the pocket linings to the centre front for a non-stretch “gut slimming” panel, as before.

My Colette Clover jeans

A few months ago, I went and sewed up the Clover trouser pattern for the first time, in dark green sateen. Having fixed the zipper (my own mistake), I realised that I love the great fit of these trousers, but they’d be even better with traditional pockets and a front fly more like jeans… in fact, I’d actually just like some Clover jeans.

So that’s exactly what I did!

I first altered the pattern to create the front pockets (and I extended the pocket lining piece to the centre front to make a “gut slimming” panel), add a fly-front, and extend front waistband to match the fly underlap. I also added back pockets and belt loops off another jeans pattern. I didn’t bother to draft a back yoke as I actually prefer the look of jeans without them, and the back darts just disappear into the pockets anyway.

This stretch denim is ex-designer from Ditto Fabrics and it’s the exact same stuff I used in these designer jeans (I loved it so much I bought more). The pocket linings and waistband facings are fun Spoonflower cotton prints – Rainy Day Doodles for the pocket linings and fly underlap, and foxes for the inner waistband (the latter by my mate Galia!).

The first Jalie jeans

The ladies at the Walthamstow meetup got a sneak peek of my new jeans on Saturday, but now everyone can have a look at my (mentally counts…) sixth pair of jeans!

I wanted to try out the Jalie 2908 jeans pattern in cheap fabric before I broke out my good stuff, so I made these using some cheap stretch denim from Goldhawk Road, bought for £3/m. It’s papery and stiff and smells kinda like petrochemicals when you iron it, but it was taking up room in my stash and was good enough to try out the pattern (and good enough for wearing round the boat, too!).

I made the regular rise version (as opposed to the low-rise) and I knew these were bootcut, but wow, this has a VERY flared leg! But the fashion mags can’t stop going on about how flares are big for SS11, so I suppose I’m ahead of the pack with these. I think the rise here is good and comfortable, and the crotch curve, bottom, and thigh fit my “white girl pancake butt” really well. The leg length on these was almost perfect for me, too – I only needed to add 1-2 cm past their hem line (I usually have to add more for Burda trousers, and nothing at all for Knip’s).

Nostalgic flowered jeanskirt

I’ve had this flowered black and red denim I’ve since I was 13 or 14 year old. I remember being so inspired by the “sewing machine driver’s test” we took in Home Ec class that I got my mom to buy me this at JoAnn’s Fabrics and I made a really simple tote bag out of this using her old pea-green Kenmore sewing machine. The bag fell apart soon after (let’s just say I wasn’t big on following any “rules”), but I just attached the straps back on with some safety pins and continued to use it as my school bag for the rest of the year.

I honestly had no idea this fabric even still existed, but my mom found it lurking somewhere in my old room at their house and brought it with her this summer. I looked through my pattern magazine archive (made so much simpler by scanning each of the index pages into an online album) and #113 from the July 2008 Burda WOF magazine jumped out as the prime contender.

There wasn’t much fabric left, but it was plenty enough to make this skirt. I’d definitely keep this one in mind if you’ve got a metre or so of heavyweight fabric you want to make use of!

Sew your own designer jeans!

Step One: Find yourself a pattern with tons of interesting details. In my case, I’ve used pattern #7a from the December 2008 issue of KnipMode magazine.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Burda, but when’s the last time you saw one of their trouser patterns with anywhere near this much detail?? KnipMode are by far my best source for interesting trouser patterns in the last year or so!

Step Two: Find some ex-designer denim like this black stretch denim from Ditto Fabrics in Brighton (50% Cotton 45% Polyester 5% Elastane) from “one of the Italian designers”. It’s listed as black, but when it’s held up to black, it looks blue, and when held up to navy it looks black. Whatever the colour, it’s seriously the nicest stretch denim I’ve ever come across, and it’s really similar to the weave you find in RTW jeans.

Step Three: Sew!