So yeah, was a little bit excited for some new Cardcaptor Sakura after all these years.  This time, Xiaolang gets some of Tomoyo's handywork in a new battle costume.  Lots of nods to his outfit in the original series.  Having recently made the outfit from the original series and a hoodie, of course needed to make the Clear Card series outfit.

In some ways this outfit is simpler than the original costume, in others more complex.  But having gone through the process once, I knew some things I wanted to do differently.

In the original outfit, I was never fully happy with how the orange trim (like between the green and yellow on the sleeves) came out.  It was basically bias tape and I did a satin stich on top.  The finish looked nice, but the material I used comes apart too easily, so it's started to frey in some places

For this one, I didn't want to do the satin stiching.  I also want to fully line the tails of this one, as I didn't fully line the previous outfit.

I started with the undershirt as that's the simple part.  :)  I don't have pictures here, but it's just a basic black turtleneck with bias tape around the bottom edge.  The main difference I could see between that anime and manga versions is the manga uses a white trim for the bottom of the shirt, where it's orange in the anime.  I went with the anime version.

This post focused on the pants.  I'll do a Part 2 with the top.

 

Li's pants aren't quite bell bottoms, but they are pretty wide at the bottoms.  I went through a couple of pencil designs on how to do the pant legs.  Ultimately, after a converstaion with a friend, she pointed to look at Lantern Sleeves and that seemed the most like the pant leg bottom and something I was able to adapt into the design.

I started with designing on paper.  I took an old pair of pants and traced out the basic design of the pants leg fronts and backs.  Most pants have a seam running down both sides, but since there's the design on the leg of these pants, I wanted to try to avoid that outer seam.  I took the paper template from my pants and traced out having the two legs attached together.  While keeping the tops togther, spread the legs out at an angle to create the wider shape of the leg bottom.  After many (many) dead trees, I finally had a paper design that seems right so moved on to create a muslin.

So the pieces of the pant are the upper leg pieces, a round circle with a circumferences of 33" for the leg bottom. This helps keep the shape of the pant.  I measured what the smallest hole I could comfortably fit my foot through and that was about a 15" circumfrence, where a 10" circumference wrapped my leg above the ankle pretty well.  The stretch black fabric I had streched from 10" to 15", so cut out two 10" x 6" rectangle for the cuffss.

Having the muslin let me confirm sizing and make a few other adjustments to the height of the legs.  Then it was time to start cutting the real thing.

I roughed out the bottom design on paper and cut out the sections of black fabric made of the same type of cotton as the green.  On the original outfit, I was able to use some double sided iron-on adhesive to attach the white accents to the black fabric, so I started doing the same with this one.  However, with this fabric, the adhesive was good, but not as good as I would like so wound up doing a top stich around the edges.

How I would do the orange border between the green and black sections was the source of much debate with the wife.  I tend to not like doing top stiching on the machine for things like this because it always ends up looking a little too hand-made for me.  When I saw my wife using a fancy new foot to "stich in the ditch" on one of her projects, I thought I'd give it a try here.

I cut strips of 2" bias tape out of the orange fabric with a 4-way stretch.  The wife also yells at me for not cutting my bias tape on a 45 degree angle so I did it her way (turns out she was right).  The next concern was how the tape would strech with all the angles involved.  After watching a couple youtube videos I found a technique that I thought would work.  Basically keeping the bottom edge as tight as possible while still laying flat and streching out the top to form the curve.

Lots of pins were deployed, but was able to stich the inside of the bias tape bottom along to curve before folding over and top stiching the top edge.  I used earlier mentioned fancy guide foot that ran right along the edge of the tape that kept the top stiching looking straight and not hand-sewn for once (big fan).

With the design portion in place (thank god the design doesn't run into the bottom of the pant leg), serged the leg bottom circle around the pants leg bottom.  Then did the same for the cuff, keeping the fabric streched as tight as possible while running through the serger.  To attach the pants legs, turn one leg right-side out and place it inside the other leg still wrong-side out and serge the crotch seam up to where the zipper will go.

I still have to attach the zipper and do a waste band, but I'm very happy with the results so far.

2018-07-14 Xiaolang Pants

July 14, 2018, None