I’ve noticed recently that my supply of sweatpants is starting to get a bit threadbare, so they’ll need to be replaced soon. This seemed like a great opportunity to remember how to make clothes myself— I’ve been out of practice for a while.

I’ve lost a little bit of weight recently, so the first step was to re-measure. Measuring yourself is not an easy task, and quite error-prone, so I needed to somehow verify that I’d done it right.

I entered everything into the Clo avatar editor and compared the result to some photographs. That seemed like a reasonable match, so I set out to make a quick pattern to double-check. This is also the first time I’ve drafted a pattern entirely by hand, without relying on either copying an existing pattern or Clo’s avatar tracing tools. You can see the result in the cover photo of this post. The result isn’t anything particularly amazing, but should serve to check whether I’ve gotten the basics down.

I then printed the pattern out and set to work making a muslin of it to check sizing. The physical version is almost finished; all I have left to do is finish the waistband with either elastic or a drawstring. To be honest, I expected there to be some obvious problem well before this point, but the prototype appears to fit decently. Except for the whole not-staying-up thing from the missing parts, of course.

Unfortunately, my camera mount gave out partially through the project— There’s no video of the end product.