I’ve been thinking about making more of my tie-on sarong pants for a while, and then Pattern Review was having their Sustainability Sewing contest. I already made a bralette & knickers set for their option 1 (upcycled garment). Over the last few days I was thinking about how my sarong pants could probably fit into their option 2 – zero-waste sewing. But I was kind of leaving it to the last minute… or the last 180 minutes, as it were.
The contest deadline was 9pm Pacific Time on April 30. Around 4pm, while on a conference call, I sketched out how the pattern would work to turn 2m of flat fabric into a pair of pants with the least amount of waste possible.
I’ve already made these pants twice so I knew what pieces had to be included, so it was just a matter of working out how the proportions of pieces would go together to maximize the use of the fabric.
I figured out that I could use the piece cut out for the crotch to make a patch pocket that I would attach to the pants. The ties might end up a little bit long, but they could be trimmed if necessary. (As it turns out, I did trim them but it wasn’t necessary).
The fabric I chose was a piece that I’ve had in my stash for a couple of years. I had been intending to make a top out of this, but it seemed like that was never going to happen. Plus, when I laid out the fabric I noticed there was a mark of some kind on the wrong side, and it showed through a little bit. I wouldn’t have been able to use this fabric for a top after all, but it works fine for pants, and I can’t actually remember where the mark even is at this point!
To cut out the pattern, I folded the fabric lengthwise in half, then in quarters. I put down my biggest rotary cutting mat and used the rotary cutter to slice off the selvedges (which will make useful ties for fabric masks!). Next, I cut the waistband strips off… they became a bit narrower than the 11cm planned width because I didn’t quite cut straight and had to fix that a bit.
I meant to capture the how-to sewing instructions on video, and in fact I spent 90 minutes taping myself talking to the camera and sewing stuff. But then when I went to go edit the video, I found out that I’d turned off the audio feed at the start (thinking I was preventing dual-input audio) and so it was all silent. Well crap. So, I set up my camera and filmed (after three takes without sound… took a while to fix what I’d done) a little talk-through of the process.
You can view the video on my YouTube channel:
Here’s what’s left over from the fabric:
And finally, here’s the finished pants!
They are lovely and soft and flowy, and have POCKETS!!
