Oh, Clover pants. In retrospect this project turned up just fine, but we all know something is wrong when the in-progress shots are of the project wadded up, folded or sitting on the windowsill. I’m still calling this a work in progress and not a fail in progress, though it’s certainly heading that way.

I’ve made about two muslins so far for Clover, so what went wrong this time?

• the crotch area is now way too high (my math must have been totally off?)
• the muslin I’ve been using is far too stretchy than my fashion fabric
• the front part pooches out (way too wide?)
• the hips are too wide and pooch out also
• I basted everything before starting, but instead of using one inch seams like my muslin, I didn’t think my fashion fabric was stretchy enough and used 5/8 seams

This disaster didn’t come about but for lack of trying. I own about three pants fitting books, did the sitting on a chair measuring your crotch thing (that sounds worse than it actually is), measured everything really carefully and still my math was off.

I then decided to compare it to a pair of ready to wear pants that fit pretty well. In comparison, the crotch depth was way off. I started again with a standard size 4 in Colette patterns, measured the crotch curves of the green pants (pants that fit) with the Clover pants and tried again. This was the only method that worked for me.

I made a quick muslin out of some leftover cotton sateen that was slightly stretchy. These are more shorts than pants because I anticipated making 10000 more muslins after this one, but it turned out pretty well.