I finished the shorts on Sunday evening and they are currently hiding themselves in shame in the wardrobe. I don't like to blame tools, equipment or fabric for problems because usually I figure it was me, not the inanimate object, that was in the wrong. This time... not so sure.
Do love the shorts pattern. Do love the detailing. Loved that they needed almost no alterations, and they are comfortable. However, I don't like this pair of shorts. The fabric, and I do believe that it was the fabric to some extent, though I accept some of the blame, made the project difficult and not at all enjoyable. The result is most certainly not my best work. I am still not sure quite what happened, but I ran a lot of tests of the topstitching, using various threads, tried both the straight and the triple straight stitches, on two different machines, with different needles, different bobbins (rewinding to make sure I had no problems with bobbin tensions) and fiddled with both the foot pressure and the tension settings (normally the tension settings on my computerised machine need absolutely no alteration). I could not get nice, even, straight top stitching on this fabric. I could get nice top stitching on cheap muslin and on denim scraps, but not on this fabric. Which is why the shorts look as though they were topstitched by a drunken ape wearing a blindfold. Of course it looks much worse because I decided to go ahead with my original plan of using a contrast topstitching colour. Sometimes I can be too pig headed for my own good. In my head these had brown topstitching and brown buttons (oddly enough just like the illustration) and by george they were going to have these details. However, if I had been less pig headed, and used a matching thread, naturally the awful stitching would have been much less noticable.
Anyway, the shorts were fairly straightforward to construct, the only unusual thing was the L Shaped seam on the front. I thought I would try to show the construction of this feature in photo form, but I've not done this before so I am not sure if it will be clear enough. I wanted to stitch the photos together to make it easier, but they wouldn't stitch neatly. Unless it goes mad when I post this, these are now neater than my hour long attempt at stitching. Cool if it stays that way.
I've used up my maximum for one post with these photos so will do another post in a minute so I can show the finished objects.
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