Simon, asked me if I could copy a pair of jeans for him, he has finally found a pair of jeans that he likes the fit on, they are Gap and of course, not only are they the most expensive pair Gap does they are always sold out in his size. Initially I said no, not without taking them apart, but I was browsing through craftsy where I came across Kenneth D King jean-ius! :reverse engineer your favorite fit.

Before depriving Simon of his favourite pair of jeans for at least a couple of days I thought I would try it out on a pair of my jeans, as I said on my previous post I have this very nice pair of low rise Levi jeans, I have no idea on the model number (do jean even have a model number) but I have been trying to replace them from ebay but if you don’t know what they are called it is a bit hard.

I’m not going to go too deeply into the actual class, just a brief overview, if you want any more detail you’ll have to get the class, (on sale it was £16.99). Kenneth D King is very easy to listen to, the explanations are easy to follow and he is a very able presenter. After walking you through the getting of the pattern he then goes on to take you step by step to test the fit of the muslin and make changes and on to creating the finished article.

One thing that I don’t remember him mentioning is that you should probably give your jeans a quick iron, just to get the pocket edges and the crotch seam to lie flat. You trace your pattern off on to organza and from there to paper, where I discovered this amazing gadget a double tracing wheel, if I’d have known about these when I was dabbling with Lutterloh and Haslam it would have made life a lot easier! 

I do have a problem with the inseam, it wasn’t as noticeable with the first pair and I only had a problem with one leg of course I assumed that the leg that didn’t have the problem was correct, apparently not 😦

I discovered that if I pinched a bit of fabric out by the knee this straightened up the lines, what also made it a bit better is if I stretched out the back, it also pulled the seam round to the back, luckily I had already added an inch to the bottom so it was alright to lose an inch, this obviously is a cheat, I’ll correct it properly on the next draft.

So after unpicking the side and in-seams, and redoing the stitching and top stitching I tried them on, the top stitching isn’t totally right, but right enough that I won’t mind wearing them, I tried them on, disaster them struck, I obviously hadn’t tightened the stops at the top of the zipper enough as one of them popped off and the zipper tab with it, while I unpicked the fly facing and cursed Kenneth D King, I decided for my next attempt I would stick to the Lauren Dahl method of zip insertion which I did, the zip went in beautifully and there was no chance of zipper failure.

I just have the waistband to finish belt loops and button, maybe rivets ( I have to tackle them sometime. 

There is one part of the class that I have a problem with, let’s say conservative  estimate 85% of people taking this class do it to copy ‘blue’ jeans Kenneth seems to have pickup a pair of nondescript ‘jean type’ trousers, there is probably a copyright issue on actual ‘named’ jeans, however the construction method that he uses makes it impossible to put some of the top stitching in. He tells you to stitch the out seam before the inseam, we have several makes of jean in our home and they all have top stitching on the inseam and a tiny bit of top stitching over the hip on the out-seam. I must admit that once I had the pattern, 90% of construction was from my baste and gather Birkin Flares. If it works why use something different.

Bye for now