@
smithjohnj thank you so much for your vote of confidence! You're so right, we're usually our own worst critic. The fabric for the shirt is honestly the perfect color, and especially now after I've started working on the pants, I've become more happy with it. As for the things you mentioned that are more tricky, the sleeve caps were entirely by accident. I usually have a terrible time adding sleeves to every garment and aggressively cross my fingers while sewing them. I wish I had a better tip to help. The darts, though - and actually, for everything, and especially the pants seams, which I'll get to in a second - iron EVERYTHING. Pressing makes sewing everything easier, but especially flat-felled seams and keeping things like darts from puckering. I'm trying to work on topstitching lines and found my zipper foot works wonders at keeping things even and consistent, especially if you want to get topstitching next a seam or an edge. After hemming the sleeves they ended up being about 17 inches from the shoulder with about 2 to 2.5 inches from the wrist. I eyeballed the hems to be about 6.5 inches from the waist, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. I also used the size 12 pattern for the shirt - thank you so much for your help with the shoulder seams! I never could have figured that out without you.
I started the pants yesterday using the Burda 7123 pattern. The pattern is rather nice, actually - it's simple. I used Kaufman stretch cotton twill in charcoal (which is apparently no longer available from fabric.com!) and at first I had my reservations about the color, but now that I've taken photos of the fabric in different lighting I am actually very happy with it. I planned originally to dye it darker, but it's exactly what I was hoping for. I've added a few photos of the fabric in different lighting below. ALSO I made a HUGE mistake on the inside back panels and waist band: my apartment has horrible lighting, and I thought there was not a "wrong/right" side of the fabric. Had I only paid attention to the "wrong side" grain, I would have realized I'd used the wrong sides of the fabric for the back panels and waist band! I finished sewing the pants and just now realized my utter mistake. I'M SO FRUSTRATED, and you can definitely see it in the photo. But oh well, I digress.
For the Burda pattern I am usually a size 12 but went up to a 14 to account for the additional seams, and it actually worked! This rarely happens to me. The pants are definitely more tight than screen-accurate, but because they are cotton, my hope is with wear they will stretch out. I did not use the whole 5/8" seam allowance to sew the added seams, but I used a large enough seam allowance to make them flat-felled. Also, I found this fantastic tutorial for adding in a zip fly (I used a 9" zipper) and waist band to any pattern. It couldn't have been easier to follow:
https://shwinandshwin.com/2013/08/sewing-102-how-to-add-zip-fly-to-any.html
To add in the back seams, I found that if you extend the pattern grain line arrow to the bottom cuff edge and cut along the grain line arrow, you'll get a perfectly centered back seam for each leg. The seams will not overlap the darts that are already in the pattern. So my goal was to finish the pants as much as possible, and then this week I'll cut below the knee, rip out the outside front panel, and use that panel as a measurement guide for the pin tucks. When I'm finished with the pin tucks I'll reattach the pin tuck panel onto the other three panels for each leg, then reattach all four panels to the bottom of the pants. Last I'll add the webbing (likely hand stitch to attach). I hope this makes sense.
Here's what I have so far, and various photos of the fabric/seams in different lighting. Sorry about the dark photos, also! The weather is really odd here today. I'll get better photos later.
