Han Solo Costume: Making the Pants (1)

With the shirt done, the next most difficult part was going to be the making of the Han Solo pants. There are a few good resources that I looked at:

• Aimee Major's Very Helpful Guide -- she offers up an embroidery file for the bloodstripe using the Viking Designer, which is the sewing machine that I have.
• Information from the Rebel Legion. Search their forums, too. There's plenty of images of other people's costumes.

For the pattern, I opted for McCall's M6610 pants.

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From Aimee's post and embroidery file, I knew the bloodstrip was one inch wide. I made the bloodstripe pattern piece three inches wide to accommodate a french seam.

As I mentioned before, I tend to always copy out my patterns so I can make modifications as necessary. Because I had used a McCall's pattern for the 10th doctor (and Simplicity & McCalls are the same company), I felt I could make the modifications prior to making a first mockup of JUST the pattern. (Yeah, that didn't go over so well....but keep reading...)

Han's pants have a riding seam. I took out my actual riding jodhpurs and used those as a guideline for modifying the pattern. (This is the original pattern with the cutting line for the riding seam. At the same time, I knew that the bloodstripe piece was going to be three inches wide, so I removed a little bit from the outer seam of the back pattern piece to accommodate the bloodstripe width with French seams.

Here's the two new pieces that I re-drew with the added seam allowance.

The front pattern piece had very little modifications, except for removing the bloodstripe amount from the front.

For my mockup, I used carefully marked out the bloodstripe piece and used a highlighter to make stripes. This way, I could tell where the stripes were and make the mockup accordingly.

Unfortunately, my first mockup didn't quite fit all that well. It was too tight. The riding seam was perfectly aligned as was the bloodstripe, but it was a half size too small for me to wear comfortably. After making two more mockups, my final pattern had 1.25 inches added to the back pattern piece seam and 5/8 inches of fabric to the front pattern piece.

Remember when I said that Simplicity & McCall's was now the same company? Apparently, they don't use the same sloper. I SHOULD have made the pattern as-is, THEN made the other modifications. I would have had to make only two mockups instead of the three.

Now, it's time to make the full set of pants, starting with embroidering the bloodstripe....