Fish-Eye Dart: Fitting Pants or Trousers

Well….I’m working on a pair of pants right now.  I made my first pair last year as part of Sunni’s (aka A Fashionable Stitch’s) Trouser Sew Along.

She did a great job and covered lots of fitting issues but I could never get that little pool of fabric at my derriere to go away.  For any of you who has ever tried making trousers I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You can kinda see a hint of the break at the fullest part in my bum in the shot above, but I didn’t take any photos of the back since it wasn’t attractive. 

Here’s an image of Sunni demonstrating the baggy bit of fabric on her test muslin:

From my research there could be several reasons why this baggy bit happens and you should explore them all, as needed.  One reason could be the back crotch curve (not enough fabric-pulls at this point or too much fabric-baggs at this point), you need to let-in/take-out the inseam for more/less ease, or there’s simply just too much fabric.

When I made my first pair of trousers I tried several of the fixes (adjusting the curve of the crotch seam and letting out fabric in the inseam) but nothing helped.  It was very frustrating…  I could never tell if the fabric was pulling vs. pooling.  Crazy right!!!

Anyhow…  after searching on the web for nearly 2 hrs I think I finally have the (magical) fix for this issue!

The technique is called a Fish-Eye Dart.  I found out about this particular type of dart buried in this thread, where a girl was looking to fit her jeans.  Ann Rowley came to the rescue and described the process in the forum (which she calls a flat seat adjustment) but also added step-by-step images on flickr

I have read the fitting book for pants/trousers and I never recall coming across this technique.  I imagine I would have used it last year had I known about it….  

The procedure reminds me of a SBA.  The fish-eye dart is a horizontal dart taken underneath the bum; its fuller in the middle and tapers out on both sides to close to nothing.

 (Image is from Ann Rowley’s flickr set)

After finally finding a fix for the pooling fabric derriere issue, I’m actually excited to go and try to refit my trousers.  How crazy is that?!  I’m hoping it will end up being a magic bullet for my trouser-butt issue, but we’ll see… 

Since it took me so long to try to find a good solution, I wanted to write-up a quick post and send the word out to any of you who may be working on pants/trousers in the future.

One additional resource I found helpful was this video from a Silhouette Patterns’s webcast that  goes about fitting a pair of jeans, live.  It’s a long video and I’ve watched the first 25 minutes already and found it really informative.

As a final technical note, trousers technically shouldn’t be as fitted as pants/jeans are.   With classic trousers, fabric falling off of the derriere should fall straight down to the floor without creasing while with pants/jeans the fabric curves around the bum.  I have the same pooling issue on both pants and trousers so for the above topic I’ve used trousers/pants/jeans synonymously.

Have any of you heard or seen of this technique with fitting trousers/pants before?

In: Sewing

Blogger for 6 years and counting, I am a passionate creator who loves to tinker.

Comments (10)