Making Birgitta Helmersson’s Pleat Pants

Some easy weekend sewing has been had, making Birgitta’s pleat pants from the Sewing Without Scraps book.

These are culottes-style pants, with an elastic waist, side pockets and a cropped length.

The fabric is a bit special. It’s some superfine premium merino wool suiting which is quite fluid and has a subtle charcoal stripe. It came to me via the mighty stash of L from Hallet Cove. As usual with suitings, it has the details woven into the selvedge.

My teen happened to walk by as I was cutting out and thought the reverse side of the text looked rather Tolkien Elvish-esque.

As the fabric has the details written on selvedge, I thought it would be good to leave it on the fabric somewhere on the inside, and conveniently it turned out to be the waistband edge. The instructions finish the inside waistband edge with bias binding, but I had the selvedge.

The front and back are the same, apart from the direction the pockets sit towards, so I put a label in the back for easy dressing (would recommend).

The pleat pants, in spite of their simplicity, have some interesting features. There are no side seams; the side seam pockets are inserted into slits cut into the sides, ending with a dart below the pocket.

The amount of fullness in the pants relies on how wide your fabric is – any fabric from 110cm/43″ wide to 135cm/53″ wide can be used. The merino suiting is 154cm wide, and seeing as I was making the second largest size (LL) I chose 135cm wide. They would easily look good narrower too.

Due to the cutting layout, the length of the pants is dependent on the size chosen; the bigger sizes are longer (but you could take any depth hem to make the length whatever). I’m 168cm/5’6″ tall wearing size LL; the model in the book is 162cm/5’4″ and I believe she’s wearing size M.

While we were making the patterns for this book, Birgitta realised that the same pattern pieces could be used for either pleated pants or a pleated skirt with side splits. Both have pockets. The pockets are excellent, by the way.

When I first saw these pants (we made informal show-and-tell videos to show each other what we were working on) I thought how wonderfully a black pair would go with my bias top from the same book. And now I have some.

I think these will go with lots of things – denim jacket, neat fitting cardigans, skivvies, vests and more I’ve yet to try out.