V8955, A Love Letter

Today, I bring you four versions of the same pattern! This is definitely one of my TNT (tried ‘n’ true) patterns, although it’s kind of unusual to fall into that category because it’s not a simple dress, or a t-shirt, or a pair of versatile pants. Instead, I submit to you: V8955. Yup. Not only is it a Big 4 pattern, it’s high-waisted. It has waist ties. It uses 4m (4 1/8 yards) of fabric just for the short version. It has many pleats. It has encased boning in the side seams of the waist. (It has pockets.) It looks like a skirt but is in fact pants. AND I LOVE IT. I don’t think many people online have actually made these. Only six people have posted about them on Pattern Review, and there have been only 19 posts tagged with #v8955 on Instagram (and five of them are mine). So I’m here to convince you to make a pair of floor length (or calf length) swishy rayon pants that will make you feel like you are wearing the world’s most elegant pajamas.

Exhibit A: the only floor-length version of the pattern I’ve made. I made these back before I reaaalllyyy knew how to sew properly, and because of this all of the seams inside are pinked instead of serged. Which I try not to look at. I made these to wear for concerts, because I’m a classical musician and we always have to wear floor-length black. I didn’t make a muslin (because I didn’t know any better), but knew from other McCall’s patterns that I’m usually a 12. They needed 5.7m of fabric. Yup. 5.7m. (Or 6 1/4 yards for the metrically-challenged.) I got this plain black rayon from Fabricville at the same time as I bought the pattern, because I had this exact garment in mind. I’m pretty sure it all together cost more than $100 even with the pattern being on sale at the time, but it’s SO WORTH IT. They are one of my most favourite things I’ve ever made.

The pattern pieces are so big for the pant legs that you have to assemble the tissue paper just like you would with a PDF pattern because they are TOO BIG TO PRINT even for an industrial printer. And you have to cut all four pant pieces on a single layer because they’re too big to fit on folded fabric. Although you’d probably want to do this anyway with the shifty shifty rayon to avoid distortion of the pieces. There are a great many pleats on the front and back of the pants, so you have to trace those lines onto the fabric. Conveniently, the pleat template has been given a separate piece for each size so you don’t have to try to decipher which lines correspond to your size with a magnifying glass. (In the photo below, I appear to have brushed up against my salt-encrusted car at some point on my way to/from my Friday night concert. Excellent.)

The many many pleats do a great job at containing all the volume of the pant legs in the waist band without creating a lot of bulk like gathers would. They also mask the zipper in the back (which it didn’t occur to me to take a picture of until Exhibit D, so bear with me), and hide the side seam pockets. The waistband is very wide, so the pattern has you sew two short pieces of encased boning into the side seams of the waistband lining. This sounds much more fussy than it actually is. The only really fussy bit is having to hand sew the waistband lining down on the inside, but it’s worth it to get the clean finish outside in my opinion. (By the way, this is View C of the pattern.)

The waist ties are very long. This version of the pants is the only one where I actually cut them at the full length of the pattern piece, because you have to cut them along the grainline to fit them. All the other versions of this pattern I made using a print and also didn’t want to buy any more fabric than necessary, so I cut them cross-grain in order to preserve the pattern orientation and to save a bit of fabric. I find the long ones very satisfying on this black version, but don’t think it suffers any for having them be a bit shorter as you’ll see below.

These black pants have been to many places, including South Korea on an orchestra tour, and to a concert in Quebec where it was so hot inside the church where we were playing (even with fans and the windows/doors open) that I hiked up the right leg of my pants behind my double bass so that I could get a bit of a draft going without the audience seeing my scandalously bare leg. Could you do that with a skirt? I THINK NOT. Another plus is that they don’t blow up and expose your underwear when it’s really windy because they are pants and thus incapable of blowing up due to their possession of a crotch seam.

I did shorten these considerably, I should note. I’m 5’4″ and these were definitely not drafted for someone of my height. And due to my inexperience at the time, shortening them was a NIGHTMARE. I think I had distortion in the cutting phase, because shortening them a consistent length along the bottom edge did not lead to an even hem. So I had to stand in the pants and have my mum eyeball it and draw a chalk line around, and I’m really not convinced that the hem would pass muster on the Great British Sewing Bee, but it looks pretty even to me so I’m happy with it.

On to Exhibit B. These pants are basically View C, except shortened to the length of View A. All the makes in this blog post are unlined to allow for maximum experience of the softness of the rayon against my legs. If I made them in something more fancy like a chiffon or something, I might line them to prevent cling, but it really wasn’t necessary with this fabric. The fabric for this version is a Rifle Paper Co./Cotton & Steel rayon, which I got from the workroom (I think Fabric.com is one of the only places that still has it). I really hope Ruby Star Society uses the same or similar for their rayon if they offer it. It’s so soft but has such a good weight so it isn’t as fussy to work with. This is actually the third version I made, but I’m presenting it as Exhibit B in my quest to convince you of the merits of this pattern because NO ONE can resist the excellence of Rifle Paper Co. Especially this particular print. It’s so PREETTYYYY. I always get the most compliments when I wear this out in public. People rush up to me gasping, “Is that Rifle Paper Co.?!” I actually had never really heard of Rifle prior to their collaboration with Cotton & Steel, but since then I’ve seen their stuff eeeeeeverywhere. And I’m not mad about it.

Excuse the wrinkles of these and all the other ones below. They often don’t need to be ironed because the fabric relaxes once you’ve been wearing them for a few minutes, but I hadn’t worn them recently and did not have it in me to iron basically 12m of fabric. As you can see in the photos below, the waist ties are much shorter than the ones above. I think it still works, and honestly is potentially a better balance with the shorter hem length of these than if I had gone with the full length.

Exhibit C, in another Cotton & Steel rayon. This one is from Sarah Watts’ collection Honeymoon, and I got it from Fabric.com (and it’s still just barely stock, shockingly!). This one I don’t wear as much as the other ones. I think it’s maybe because it’s hard to compete with Rifle Paper Co. and the fabric you’ll see in Exhibit D. If I only had this one, I think I’d probably wear it all the time, but it sort of takes a backseat based on my current wardrobe.

As you can see, it was pretty important with this print to have the waist ties cut in the same direction as the rest of the pants, otherwise the ties would have stripes running vertically instead of horizontally. The great thing about the pattern pieces is that the bottom hem is exactly perpendicular to the grainline, so if you have a stripe or some other geometric print going on, you’ll be able to get it running evenly along the hem if you’re precise. I pulled the legs apart substantially in the photo below, as well, so you could get a sense of where the crotch falls. It’s a very low crotch, which further enhances the feeling of wearing a skirt. If you wanted to, you could raise the crotch, but I feel pretty confident that it was drafted to have the crotch be like this, since the bottom of the curve falls pretty close to mid-thigh on me.

And finally, I bring you Exhibit D. These are my favourite of all, and I saved them for last so I could use them as the final argument. I love this print. It’s from Sarah Watts’ collection called Magic Forest for Cotton & Steel, and I got it from Patch a few years ago. It looks like it’s practically glowing in the dark, which I’m super into. The Rifle ones get more comments in the wider world, but these ones are closest to my heart. I think it’s such an interesting print, and funky but somehow also being a bit understated (in the context of my wardrobe, anyway).

The top I’m wearing in all of these pictures is one of my favourite RTW shirts, and I intend to knock it off when I get a chance so I can make more. It’s long so it goes down to my hips and stays tucked into the high waist nicely. I used to have a Closet Case Nettie bodysuit that I wore all the time with all of my V8955s, but my shoulders have gotten bigger and in combination with that and the fact that I put it in the wash and it shrunk despite having prewashed the fabric, I need to make a replacement for that. (It’s in my veeeeery long queue.) So if you’re concerned about how you would style these pants, a long-ish fitted shirt is a good option, or a bodysuit!

They are closed in the back with a regular zipper. (I didn’t notice until looking at these photos that I don’t have it zipped to the top, oooops.) I interfaced a little lightweight strip of fusible on either side of the center back to make it easier to sew in the zipper with this rayon, but I didn’t do that with the first black pair you saw, and they also turned out fine.

So! Make this pattern! I’ve presented my case. Go out into the world and make this tag on Instagram have more than 19 posts. Swish around in your secret pajamas. They’re especially good on breezy days, and will probably make feel like you’re Carrie Bradshaw swanning about NYC (just a guess).