Threads #149 June/July 2010 arrived a few days ago. Yesterday I glanced at "One Pant, Five Looks", dismissed all the "looks", garnered the depressing news that shank standards have been deprecated, stuck a marker at "Vintage Presser Feet", and closed the book.
This morning I picked it up while waiting for DH to come out of the shower, didn't want to spare enough attention to read "Vintage Presser Feet", read "Five Looks". As I expected, it was all techniques I've been using for decades, but the insistence that an added tab must point forward rang a bell.
Sometime in the twentieth century, I gave up trying to imitate an old^H^H^H vintage pair of jeans that had triangles set in the seams near the ankle -- one could snap the tabs together in back to confine one's pants legs for cycling -- because my flat-felled inseam pointed the wrong way. But one could sew the side seams backward to match, and buttoning the straps together in *front* would work even better, and never mind that front-pointing tabs look dorky, these are working pants.
I got a few splashes of cold water while typing this, of course. The reason for snapping in back is that the leg is straight in front. My problem wasn't wrong-way, but that the inseams point opposite ways. Well, I suppose one could button one leg in front and the other one in back. But above all: safety pins work better!
Still, maybe I shouldn't have skipped "Free-Motion Embellishment" just because all the "beautiful" examples looked as though one had run a lawnmower over the fabric. If DH should take up caving again, I might take up free-motion embroidery again.
(Cavers use all parts of their bodies as feet. This leads to a lot of patching and darning of caving clothes. But I gather that nowadays one can buy Cordura coveralls.)
I'll close with an unfair snark at the dart-and-tab "pant look" for proposing that one eliminate the side seam so that one can add a dart to provide a side seam to insert the tab in.
Unfair, because including instructions for carving a dart out of a side seam would have expanded the instructions from half a page to two pages -- two pages the author didn't have -- and would have made a simple operation seem very complex.
Not to mention that the idea of putting a tab into a side seam is one that anyone who wants it can think up on his own.
Joy Beeson