Adding a gusset to pants pt.1

Posted by Kathleen Fasanella on Sep 16, 2008 at 4:58 pm / Tutorial / Trackback

Today I got to do some alterations. Yeah me. I’m not fond of alterations. Based on past discussions, apparently many of you aren’t either (comments are hilarious). Eric got some pants that we had to have, that had a too short crotch. The only solution to fix a camel toe -after the fact- is to install some gussets. More yeahs for me. The very least I should get out of this annoyance deal is a post for my blog. Done well, I should be able to parlay the suspense into two entries. Heh.

Before I get to that, there was something that bugged me about the whole affair that you should think about in mostly two respects. One is customer feedback and the second is whether you should even sell your seconds.

Selling your seconds
We bought these pants from Sierra Trading who sells seconds and overstocks. For the most part, I like this vendor, you can get some good deals or at least I have up until now. In this case, these pants were way too small. Forget the camel toe for now, the first issue was a matter of size. Eric definitely takes a medium (defined as a 34″ waist in this brand) but we had to return the mediums for larges (36″-38″ waist). Even with the size large, the crotch was entirely too short (below).

My impression on this brand sold by Sierra Trading is lessened making me wonder if it’s advisable for a brand to sell problematic styles or if it’s better to destroy them. It’s a tough choice, recoup a certain loss on defective styles in the short term by selling them as seconds or diminish the reputation of your products over the long term. For what it’s worth, the women’s pants in the same style didn’t have this problem causing me to speculate how this drafting defect happened.

Customer Feedback
One thing that was very useful on Sierra Trading albeit after the fact, was customer feedback. There were quite a few comments from customers who mentioned these pants ran small only we didn’t notice that feature was available until we went back to process the return. I think soliciting feedback from customers -even if it is negative- is very useful. We still would have bought the items but we would have saved ourselves the cost of shipping a return. Mike wrote a post about the power of a good (or bad) review so that’s something you might consider offering if your site sells consumer direct online.

Guessing a gusset
Preamble dispensed with, the first trick to making a repair is trying to figure out how too small something is and that’s practically impossible to do with anything approaching engineering rigor. You can only correctly alter something that is too big. If it’s too small, how can you tell by how too small it is? Nonetheless, I had to try.

My first attempt was with a visual, trying to get an idea of that crotch shaping; the seams were flat felled so it’s not as though they were going to cooperate and reveal all. Here is a photo of the crotch shaping spread apart.

Perhaps you have no point of comparison -c’mon, go drag out a pair of men’s slacks- but what I’ve shown is a very dramatic disparity between the crotch length and thigh width. Brrrrr, makes me shiver all over just thinking about having to wear something like that. Pity. That’s what it is. My alteration was motivated by pity. Boo for me.

I started by opening up that crotch seam. Then I had Mr. Fashion-Incubator put the pants back on. Then I attempted to fold the raw edges together to arrive at a crude approximation of the disparity. I don’t know if you can tell from the scale below but the gap wasn’t very much, the length of the first digit of my index finger or about 1″.

Now I don’t know about you but a difference of only 1″ makes me nervous. Having the effect it had, there had to be more to it than that so 1″ wasn’t going to suffice for me. So, relying on my highly attenuated super-duper pattern making wizard skills, I guessed I should double it.

More on what I did next is tomorrow. In truth, I’m not holding out on you; I could have stuck it here. Problem is, Eric is at home and I need a photo of him wearing the pants to see if the gusset I installed solved the problems. I mean, it wouldn’t do for me to show you everything I did if it doesn’t work, neh?

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