A non sewing ramble and a pants sloper

Not a lot of sewing has been happening lately.  The kids have been on April vacation for the last week and I've been concentrating on having fun with them.  I do admit that there are times that I really miss the kids now that they're both in school full time.  Not the day to day stuff, but the fun outings etc.  So I managed to totally fill the first half of vacation week with a million and 1 things.  Monday we learnt how to letterbox, then painted bee hives at our favourite ice cream store. Tuesday was a trip to Plymouth, Wednesday a train trip in to town and Thursday a hike with our old playgroup friends and a brownie trip to the the bowling alley.  After all that we were exhausted to we tried to take it as easy as possible for the rest of the week.....well as much as we could between birthday parties.  Then finally on Sunday I came down with some bug and spent the day in bed.  So all in all not much time to spend on sewing.

What time I did find during this week and the one before has been spent trying to perfect a pants pattern.  This has been on my to do list ever since my last pair of pants that I wasn't entirely happy with.

I decided to start from the beginning and draft a pair of pants from scratch.  I used this tutorial to start the process.  The front I was happy enough with, 

but the minute I turned around the problems started, there was just so much pulling in so many different directions.

I spent days on and off making minute adjustments.  I would think that I had it then go back and try them on again and realise just how bad they still were and try more adjustments. Nothing worked.

Finally I thought that as I was planning on making a pair of cargo pants maybe I should try letting them out and seeing if I could get them to work that way, so I made a second sloper with wider pants and extra ease around the hips

Again OK in front.

.
But still pulling terribly in the back.

A lot more playing around with adjustments got me to this, but I still wasn't happy.

Lying in bed one night thinking over my problem I came up with a solution. I was originally thinking that I needed to make a duct tape dummy of my lower half so that I could see first hand where the problem was, and then I thought about how I make my shoes, using duct tape to tape over an existing shoe to create a pattern and thought, why can't I do that for pants too?  So the next morning saw me in the middle of the kitchen wrapping myself in plastic bags and then taping myself together.  Once I had my abdomen done and had taped down the length of one legs and halfway down the other I ran out of duct tape, but I figured that that would be enough.  I took and thick artline pen to my tape pants and drew in where the side seams, the front and back seams and the inner seams should be and also a straight line down the front and back of the leg, then I cut down each of the seam lines to get myself out.  What I ended up with was:

I compared my duct tape piece with my original pattern - what did I find?

  I had seriously underestimated the amount of pitch I needed on my back pattern piece.

So I made yet another sloper based on my duct tape pattern.

Very tight obviously as it has no ease, but most of the pulling issues seem to be resolved.

So I took this pattern and modified it into cargo pants - and ended up with:

Crap!

Well I obviously did something wrong.  This is definitely something I struggle with - adding ease - I've still not found any good resources on how and where to add ease, all you ever seem to get is "Add 2 inches ease around the hips"  OK but how?  and seriously 2 inches that would be so baggy.

So after a bit of logical thinking I think I've realised the issue.  When adding ease to the center back and front seams I just added the ease onto the outside of the entire seam, but where it curves at the bottom the ease should actually be taken out not added on.

I made a few adjustments and ended up with this.

It's still not perfect but I've finally decided that I just have to go for it, if I spend any more time on this I'm going to go insane and I figure a pair of pants that isn't perfect is still better than no pants at all.  Hopefully once the waistband is on and all the pockets are in place it'll be less obvious.

So that's it.  I've finalised my pattern,  including pocket details, cut out the fabric and its just waiting for me to get around to sewing it all together.  My next question is what colour top stitching I will use and what design to put on the back pocket.