Tuesday, October 12, 2010

TDK Mesh Undersuit Progress

Today was a great day as far as progress on the mesh undersuit goes. This has really been a concern of mine, and I'm a little nervous about it. Maybe anxious is the better word. As mentioned earlier, the fabric that I got for the mesh outer suit is the EXACT same fabric that was used in the production made suits. It took Brad a LONG time to find it, and it was expensive. SO naturally, there is a premium price attached. I'm fine with that.

The bummer is, with my track record for putting stuff together, it usually takes like 10 iterations to get it right. So while I've been burning through twill and muslin to make my pattern correct, you just never know.

After LITERALLY 15 or 20 iterations, I came up with my pattern for the legs. From earlier attempts, you would have seen that I had from the crotch down totally perfected, but everywhere upwards was elusive. It took cutting up a pair of jeans to get it right. Here's the final pattern.



I made one last pair of trousers out of twill to confirm that my pattern was right.



And they fit really really well. I am very pleased. I jumped ahead and tore into the mesh fabric. I was pretty nervous cutting into it. I'm not going to lie.

Ultimately, everything turned out really well. Here is the final results:



Interestingly enough, these did NOT fit the same way the twill pants did. I guess it has something to do with the way the material moves, or something. I really don't know. It took a few tweaks after I had sewn them all up, but they are really nice and should work well.

Serging with this fabric was also challenging, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and I'm very happy with the results. I am curious to see how well all of the stitching holds together once I start walking around in the thing.

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