Who wouldn’t like to eat cheesecake and sew pants in the same size as before? Trial and error, I have found are the best tools in sewing.  There are so many different ways to achieve the same end result.  Or something as simple as cutting out a waistband the wrong way can make you hate your pants!  That’s horrible, really.  I’ve cut the waistband going the wrong way before on leggings.  I couldn’t wait to get them off.  I almost had to cut them off.

A week or so ago, I found this amazing website, it’s called Fabric-Incubator, the tagline is “lessons from the sustainable factory floor” sounds legit.  The site has been around quite awhile too.  You should check it out.

Okay so she was saying people lay out the waistband all wrong.  Ready to wear waistbands are cut with the grain going around the body. The picture below is from that site, it’s a BAD example.

The manufacturer makes clothing like this because of their equipment.  It just works faster.  We sew our own things, we can take time and care to do the work properly. 🙂 In this fashion the legs are cut on the lengthwise grain, while the waistband is stitched in the opposite direction.  This causes the waistband to shrink at a different rate than the rest of the garment.  We hate this!  We think we are getting fat and we aren’t actually because of the manufacturing the waistband is actually getting smaller!  Go ahead, eat that cheesecake!

How do you cut the waistband properly?

Below is another picture from the website.  It demonstrates the appropriate method for cutting waistbands.  Nice, then you won’t have to cut your pants off after all that hard work.  Learn from my mistakes.  I have plenty!

I love that this has the waistband at the bottom of the pants.  WOW, it makes cutting it out so much easier. Or am I the only one with short arms who cannot reach that spot it shows you to cut on?