Making Danielle Elsener’s ZW Scout Pants (part 1)

The Scout Pants by Danielle Elsener of DECODE are in the new Sewing Without Scraps book, and I’ve been planning to make them since the book came out.

There are two versions of these pants: elastic waist and fly front/regular waistband. I’m doing the fly front version, in denim.

The trousers have two back pockets, two side seam pockets, and a little pen pocket on the leg. Love me a pen pocket! I’m thinking I might not do the elastic at the hems.

Sewing Without Scraps is in Japanese, requiring the instructions to be translated first. I took a jpg photo, then “translate image” in Google Translate, and it did a reasonable job.

Then I traced the templates off the pattern sheet in the book. The book relies on templates as we only had one double-sided pattern sheet between the three of us (I sure didn’t want to be the designer who hogged all the space on the pattern sheet!). If you wanted to, you could use the templates to draw the whole cutting layout on paper first; otherwise you could just draw them straight onto the fabric, which is what I did.

After all the translating and template tracing, the actual cutting went fairly quickly. There’s a cutting guide HERE.

I made a few tiny changes to the layout while I was doing it. In case you’re reading this with a view to making these, I omitted the beltloops between the pockets to give deeper pockets, made the side seam pockets 16cm wide, cut the waistband/beltloops/fly pieces/pen pocket on the straight grain because I had enough fabric, and while I was cutting the waistband I omitted the seam and cut it in one piece (10cm wide). We’ll see if it works out okay.

I’m making the biggest size (LL/3L) with 7cm added to the leg length. Generally, I have very “standard” length legs and RTW trousers are always fine, but this book is designed for 160cm tall Japanese women and I’m 168cm tall.

It’s pretty simple to adjust the length, and it can be done by just making the main template longer or shorter. You’ll need to lengthen or shorten HALF the amount (3.5cm in my case) because the amount will automatically double when you cut them out.

And so…I now have a pair of zero waste trousers all cut out and ready to sew. I’m sure looking forward to doing lots of topstitching! While this is a bit of a “nothing to see here” blog post, please join me next week for the finished pair.

PS Aussies: I still have a few copies left of this book in my shop.