Ready To Sew: Pleat Pant
When the Pleat Pant was first released by Ready To Sew, I saved the post and added it to my mental pile of “someday” projects. I had this lofty idea to fully patchwork some linen. So imagine my surprise when Raphaëlle reached out and asked me to be a guest blogger on her site. Here’s a summary of the blogpost I posted on her site.
The Pleat Pant is an elastic waist pant with a faux wrap detail at the front inspired by Thai fisherman pants. I had my pattern printed from a copyshop in the A0 file. I only printed the first 4 pages of the pattern as I chose to do view 1 without a pocket at the front. I am team trace, especially because I like to trace my A0 patterns so that I can modify them easily, but still have the original on hand just in case.
I used my hip measurement to choose my size, which placed me in size 49; however, I still wanted to retain the amount of gathers in the elastic waistband so I graded to a size 52 in the waist based on my waist measurement. I’m also 5’4” and the pattern is drafted for 5’6” so I removed 2” at the top shorten/lengthen line.
I opted for medium weight linen from Blackbird fabrics, Stylemarker fabrics and Salt Lake Sewciety for my version. All linens are of magnificent quality. I chose these because they were the same weight, and all fell within the fabric recommendations for this pattern.
The sewing instructions are very straight forward, but if you have any trouble understanding any part of it there is a matching tutorial available on the Ready To Sew site along with Youtube videos (for me, this was mostly for the section where you create the wrap detail; the video makes it super easy). I’m an extremely visual sewist so there were two areas of the instructions that confused me and after emailing Raphaëlle it turns out there were two errors in the instructions. The first was the cutting layout where it shows to cut the pattern pieces facing right side up on the wrong side of the fabric. This works just fine, but the legs are then reversed resulting in the faux wrap being on the opposite side as intended. I ended up cutting my pattern pieces right side up on the fabric facing right side up.
The second element was in Step 21 where it states to put “wrong sides together” when joining the leg pieces at the front and back. This should be “right sides together”. A simple fix but one that could trip up an inexperienced sewist. Raphaëlle has confirmed that these have been rectified now.
I really enjoyed making the Pleat Pants. The construction is a little different to what you would assume for elastic waist pants, but the tutorials and videos are there for the sections that cause any confusion. View 1, that I chose to do, only has 4 pattern pieces: the pocket, the waistband channel and the left and right legs. This is quite easy to put together but does require quite a wide fabric. I think I would have struggled to find fabric I loved in the width required had I not patchworked my own fabric with linen pieces. I love the feel of these in linen and highly recommend using mid-weight linen for your version. It’s light and breathable while still retaining the intended shape of the pattern.
