Sew Country Chick

A modern sewing blog

Mie From Sewing Like Mad: Culottes Shorts Pattern Hack !

My first guest blogger this week is Mie from Sewing Like Mad.
I discovered Mie in one of my linky parties. Her clothing was so well made and professional looking. Mie has only been blogging since April and she already has several great projects. Mie had her own clothing line in Denmark but now she is a stay at home mom in North Carolina. Welcome to Sew Country Chick Mie!
Today Mie is going to explain how to turn a normal shorts pattern into a pair of those super cute wide shorts seen in many shops recently……
Cullottes from the Gap.
The following post is part one on how to create the wide legged shorts pattern.
To see part two on how to sew the reversible culottes shorts, click here!
I was trying to figure out what these wide legged shorts are called and then I remembered the word is Cullottes!
Hi everyone, Mie here from Sewing Like Mad with part one of a guest post about reversible skirt like shorts.
Thank you Justine for letting me invade your cool blog.  
Part one will focus on drafting the pattern for the shorts. And when you are through here you can head over to Sewing Like Mad and read part two that focus on the sewing…..and see photos of the shorts’ other side. Uhhh, the suspense.
I will hurry up and admit that these (very wide) shorts are a GAP knock off. Normally I am against copying BUT when it comes to copying enormous companies like GAP, H&M, Zara and so on I am more relaxed. These companies are making a lot of people happy (including myself) but what they are doing is selling clothes based on here and now trends and these trends comes most of the times from original (and much more expensive) designers. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that because most people can’t afford buying the original designer clothes anyway BUT that also mean we can copy them a little bit here and there, right!

Here you see the ‘original’ GAP shorts.
To make the pattern I started thinking whether I already had a pattern I could use as a base for these shorts and I was in luck. Do you remember THESE shorts? The pattern for those shorts is what you see above. What you need to use this tutorial is any pair of shorts with an elastic waist. So to make the skirt like shorts we need to add much more width in the legs – kind of logic, right!
It is obviously a big help to have the item you are copying liking so much that you want another one, in your possession. I measured the GAP shorts and compared it to my base pattern. I started by adjusting the side seams, then the curve of the waist and finally elongated the crotch seam.  

What we have done up to this point is added width to the crotch area and we obviously want width in the whole shorts leg. And the way to get that is what you see above. I needed to add 8 cm / 3.1 in to the back and 9 cm / 3.5 in to the front pattern piece. If I would have needed to add more width I would have cut up the pattern more but for these numbers I only cut each pattern 3 times. You cut all the way up until there is like 1 mm (in inches? Very little 😉 left and then spread the pattern part till you get the desired gap (you can see the numbers on the photo above). 

Then you fill out the gaps by putting paper under and draw your new and now curved lower shorts edge with lots of width and you are now ready to cut and sew your shorts.
I have put on the measurements on the pattern parts for a size 3T* on the photo above and I hope you will be able to make them yourself. 
Please note that the measurements above are WITHOUT seam allowances so please add that in the drafting process.
*You might wonder why I am showing you a pattern for a size 3T and then showing you photos of my 4.5 year old daughter who use size 5T. Weeeell, ideas has been flowing between Justine and I and originally I made a pair for my 2.5 year old who uses size 3. In the end we decided to focus on the (reversible) pair that Wilma is showing below. Don’t worry though I will show Evelyn and her pair of skirt like shorts next week.
Since I also own the GAP shorts in size 5 (yes, at least I did pay for the product and then copied liked so much I had to make more) I compared the size 3T and 5T and the only difference was the length of the legs that was 1.5 cm / 0.6 in longer than 3T. I decided to extend them further and make them 3 cm / 1.2 in longer than size 3T. Otherwise I kept  them exactly the same.

And now it is time to head over to Sewing Like Mad for part two of this post that focuses on the sewing.




Thanks again Justine for playing along and coming up with some great ideas for improving this double post.

But first a couple of her cute designs from her blog….
Mie’s self designed skirt which was featured at Crafter Hours recently.


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-McKenzie

Comments

  1. Hello thanks so muchfor this pattern. I have been looking for a culotes pattern for my 2.5 year old. I am just wonderin, do you cut the fabric curved as your pattern shows or do you make the top (waist line) and bottom straight? Thanks!