I got my latest design challenge. It is a little scary. But what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.
This challenge has a few parts but lets start with the main issue. Small waist, BIG booty. Based on last week’s challenge on PR, you can see that a designer would gladly choose the 12 year old boy shape over the bowling pin. I am personally afraid of addressing it. Most of the people I sew for are built roughly like me (no waist, small tummy, narrow hips, some with butts some without).
So, after a series of emails that went back and forth I decided that maybe I should brave these uncharted waters.
Part 1: Can you alter jeans to make them fit the bowling pin?
In my opinion, no. For starters, you will need to find jeans to fit the largest part of your body (namely the booty). Then you are stuck with the gaping waist problem (you could use that pouch to care stuff, but really, there is no need for that). You can try putting darts in the back to make the waist smaller. You could also take apart all of the topstitching and do some serious alterations.
Part 2. Starting from scratch.
Since I shot down the alterations, I now have to come up with a good plan to build these britches from scratch. The research begins. I plan on starting with the sewing guru who actually has some junk in the trunk. Sandra Betzina. She has writen several books and articles on the subject of hard to fit sizes. She also has her own line of patterns.
It doesn’t stop there either. I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel so there is also the component of being able to copy that one pair of pants that fits you perfectly-in-every-way-but-is-no-longer-available-in-the-store.
I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Stay tuned.