Grade Your Pants for a Perfect Fit

Download the planning sheet (pdf).

Photo: Maryellen McGoldrick

by Joyce Murphy
An Online Extra to Threads #139, pp. 44-49

Learn how to size a pattern for perfect fit in Threads #139. Mark your pattern, make a fitting pant, and prepare two planning sheets to record your changes. Then use your planning sheets to direct your pattern grading. Print your own blank planning sheets here.

Click here to download the PDF of the planning sheets.

Tailor/inventor Joyce Murphy has made pants-fitting a science. Visit JSMPatterns.com for information on her upcoming book on fitting and grading.

Threads Magazine, editor
Posted on Oct 27th, 2008 in sewing, design, garment construction, fitting, pants, waist, hand drafted patterns, grading, hip

Comments (3)

rkr4cds1 writes: Also, I do cut the back of all of my pants on the straight grain: NO jeans orientation for me!
I hate the way that style cups around the buttocks and emphasizes them. Designers today use it in every style of pants/slacks and don't limit it to just jeans: that's a main problem and what drove me to finally developing my own slopers!
Posted: 10:23 pm on March 9th

rkr4cds1 writes: I have a problem with every pair of pants I wear; my own pattern or ready-to-wear: wrinkles form in the crotch area, beginning right along the seam between your #10 and 11 and then fan down diagonally away from the point of al 4 seams coming together, crossing the line between your #10 & 9, along my inner thighs toward my knees and never rise to even a straight horizontal level, but staying in a forward and downward sweep for about 5" in front of the inseam.

I can see where the back of the crotch depth may need trimming out (though it hangs and fits smoothly in standing and walking) but am unsure about what the front half needs, as that seems unaffected by the old axiom "The wrinkles point to the problem." The seamline fits best when it rises rather quickly and shallowly, nowhere deeply/widely cut as the back half of the crotch.

I have wider high hips than derriere (3" to 4" down is where I measure my 'hip' measurement), have a flat-ish fanny several inches thinner than my high hip and can get all the rest of my pants areas to 'hang from the waist' rather than hang up on my hips or anywhere else.

What is causing this set of forward-sweeping wrinkles? And how do I fix it?

Thank you - I've just tonight learned that you were 10 miles from me last Oct!!!
rkr4cds
Posted: 9:58 pm on March 9th

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