(Almost) no waste pants

I wear a lot of jumpsuits.

They’re easy to put on, you don’t have to worry about coordinating colours or fabrics, they’re comfortable, and luckily for me they’re trendy right now.  This may sound surprising coming from a fashion designer, but I spend most of my time trying to figure out what I want to wear in the future, not right now.  And on top of that I’m not a very patient person.  The two combined make for very hasty dressing in the morning, and the jumpsuit is the perfect solution to this (minor) problem.

As a result I also design a lot of jumpsuits.

This week I’ve been struggling with the pattern for a pair of pants I want to add to the collection.  I made the muslin, tested out the pattern for fit, tried it out.  Everything works great.  But when I place the pattern on this beautiful (expensive) striped deadstock wool I have, there is a tremendous amount of fabric waste.  After writing about no waste patternmaking I’m determined to produce this collection using no waste philosophies, as I did with Spring 10, but without the simplicity of a single square shape.

As far as I’m concerned, tops and pants are just top and bottom halves of an unfinished jumpsuit.  And here comes the ‘aha’ moment.  I was going to cut a top using the same fabric as the pants anyway, so instead of thinking of them as two separate items, I’m going to cut them together, using the empty spaces created by the pants to fit in the top pieces.  It’s not a perfect solution, as you can see from the post-cutting scraps in the photo above, but it’s WAY less wasteful than the original cutting (also shown in the photo below).

Tomorrow I tackle the coat!