Yay!  As I had hypothesized (and have now proven with a sample size n=1), wide leg pants do not turn petite women into stumps when correctly proportioned! My Vogue 1051 alice+olivia pants are done and I am celebrating by staring at them endlessly in the mirror. Plus- double whammy bonus- it turns out that cuffs don’t turn me into a stump either, despite conventional wisdom that short women should avoid cuffed trousers. It’s kind of great always being right about everything.

Well, I was off on one thing. Despite having made a muslin, when I sewed these up in the fashion fabric, the waistband ended up with some odd diagonal wrinkles in the front. It fit around my waist, but didn’t sit right. You’ll recall that the Selfish Seamstress lacks waist definition which means that she’s got a disproportionately ginormous waist by pattern sizing standards. Here’s the original waistband, and you can see that it tapers in quite a bit from the hip to waist, which the Selfish Seamstress does not:

So I traced the waistband did a little slash and spread to edit the pieces:

Normally I would have traced the slashed pieces onto other paper, but since I spread the slashes open only slightly, I just used some Scotch tape to hold everything in place. You can see here the resulting difference in the waist edge and curvature:

It looks minor, but altogether it added close to an inch to the waist circumference, which was enough to yield a good fit.  And here’s the final waistband garment laid flat so you can see how much less tapered it is than the original

And yay! So flowy!

There are two tiny problems that are not going to stop me from wearing these all the time. First, I used a cream colored stretch cotton sateen remnant for the waistband facing (the pattern prescribes silk satin, and you can imagine how much of that I have lying around in my very practical stash). This peeks a tiny bit if you catch it at certain angles:

I may open out part of the waistband and add a tiny wool facing to the facing to fix it. A facing facing if you will. But I’m not terribly troubled by it. Nor am I troubled by the fact that the outlines of the back pockets show a bit through the fabric.  The wool is so soft and comfy that it definitely feels better against my skin than a lining.

I haven’t got the buttons on the back pockets because I haven’t picked them out yet :)

I think it’s wide-leg love for your Selfish Seamstress. It doesn’t hurt that every time I tried them on while fitting them, Dan would look at me with a startled expression and exclaim, “You look so tall!” I guess that’s why I pay him the big bucks to be my arm candy.

If I haven’t sold you on making your own Vogue 1051 pants yet, here’s one last pitch:

This is so much more fun in wide-leg pants than skinnies.

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