I finished my pair of jeans-with no leg twist this time! I can’t explain how pumped I am about this.

I spent so much time trying to figure out what could be causing the legs to twist. The first time it happened I thought maybe I just wasn’t careful enough when sewing the inseam and my feed dogs pulled one side through faster than the other.

That didn’t turn out to be it, and so then I thought maybe I somehow wasn’t cutting my pattern pieces out on grain. So I meticulously cut my fabric out, one leg at a time and was oh so careful.

That wasn’t it either, and so then I knew there had to be something wrong with my pattern. It is self-drafted after all, so why wouldn’t I have screwed something up?

I thought the grainlines had to be off on the pattern, so Jon and I spent a lot of time examining the grainlines on the pair of jeans I drafted my pattern from and the grainline on my pattern pieces, but they looked identical to us so we didn’t think that was it either.

I finally decided to just make a muslin and play around with it and when I did, I was able to figure out what was wrong. And guess what it was? The outseam on the front and back pattern pieces didn’t match up. The back was longer than the front.

When I sewed all my pairs of jeans together, I sewed the inseam and then pinned and sewed the outseams. But I started pinning and sewing at the hip and so since the front was shorter, it got twisted as I pinned it to the back and by the time I got to the hem it was a bit of a mess.

There was a pretty big difference-the back was about 1 1/2″ longer than the front. I knew I didn’t want my front that much higher and I knew I didn’t want my back that much lower, so for an inch of the length I tapered the back, starting at the center back and tapering down to 1″ by the time I got to the outseam.

Then for the remaining 1/2″ I split it in half and took 1/4″ off the back yoke (I tapered from the center down to the outseam again) and added 1/4″ to the front outseam (I added the 1/4″ to the outseam but then tapered down to zero by the time I hit center front).

It worked! And I learned from this that I should start pinning the outseam from the hem up. It makes sense, because the hem is supposed to be perpendicular to the grainline. If I pin that first then I can make sure the pieces stay on grain.

Anyway, I love these. I got the fabric from Mood (It was this right here) and it’s my favorite fabric yet I’ve made jeans out of.

I made them with a little bit of a tapered leg, like my last pair (and in the pictures of that last pair you can see the inseam twisting).

This pattern has been a work in progress for awhile, but I think I can finally say that this pair is just the way I want it!