As I mentioned before, I made pants! I made, what I consider to be the prettiest pants I’ve ever made. Sadly, not everyone agrees with me and apparently I look like a hillbilly. I will be ignoring the nay-sayers and continue to wear my fancy pants.
Anyway, these were fashioned after a free pattern. The pattern is called the Helena Culottes by Ralph Pink and can be found here. The pattern looks to be shortish pants, but when I made a muslin they already reached the halfway mark of my calves. I decided I wasn’t going to wear shortish pants anyway, so I added one A4 to the bottom and decided that that should be long enough to wear. It turned out that I was right!
The pants were made from a red thin wool fabric. It feels like I’m wearing pyjamas that hug me the entire day. It’s wonderful. I especially like the side view. The second picture is the front, with three covered buttons on it. These buttons are just decoration, they are not functional. In the original pattern, the flap wasn’t supposed to have the fold over that my version has, but I’m too short waisted apparently for the original pattern.
The amount of closures is quite large. The first layer is a waist stay to keep the pants up (the beige thing). There are also zip ties in the darts for a bit of stiffening. The waist stay has two sets of hook and eyes. The next layer is the zipper that closes the pants, and the hook and eye at the top of the zipper. The last layer is the snaps. There are two large snaps attached to the waistband and eight small ones to keep the flap flat. There are also two pockets in the front and two double welt pockets in the back. The welt pockets only took 3 times each side, I was staying up too late to work on those. However, they did work out wonderful, I’m also not scared of making them anymore.
In my opinion, pants don’t usually fit me this well, so I’m planning on adapting this pattern to become a multitude of different things. I’m going to try to make ‘normal’-waisted pants, a playsuit and maybe a swimsuit? But that’s all future talk. First I’m going to try to finish a long sweater, a scarf and a shirt with little vintage people on it. Wish me luck!
Hopefully Creative 
They are gorgeous – I’m really jealous
Thanks! Why are you jealous though?
Cause i want them!
Make them! The pattern is available and some similarish fabric should be available somewhere, I think..
Not hillbilly at ALL! These look lovely!
Thanks!
Hi! I am currently working through this pattern myself–quite an adventure with no directions! Your photo of the zipper has cleared SO many things… like what exactly is going on in the center of the pattern behind the front flap.
How true to the pattern did you stay in that front section? Trying to check out your seam lines to see if I’m doing it right (spoiler: I don’t think I am).
Hi! I don’t know if I did it ‘right’, but it stays up and closes so I’m guessing it is working at the very least…
As for the pattern, the one significant change I made was to eliminate the seam between the under front panel pocket section and the under front panel. For me, that seam was an eyesore in my mock up. So I compared the pieces and they seemed to fit almost perfectly together (which made me question why there was a seam there at all..). I did find that I had to take in the pants along the zipper. This meant that there was excess at the bottom which I used to make the zipper ending look nice.
This is a picture of the insides with nice paint explanation.. http://wp.me/a5vTf-tR
Hope it helps and good luck!
I actually made the exact same change in the side panels, I have no idea why that seam was there either–and on my striped fabric it was particularly ugly, and made the fabric bunch up a bit.
Did you use the fly panels for the zipper section, or just leave them out entirely?
Thanks for the interior photo, definitely helpful!
I never even cut those out, I think. Couldn’t really figure out where I’d put them, for them to be useful. The pattern seemed to instruct to cut out three, which made no sense to me at all. But I’m guessing that’s my limited pant-ing experience.
Also if you’re wondering about the red ribbon/tape, that was to ensure a little bit of stability to put the snaps on. I thought the wool itself would stretch out of shape too much.
I’m now really curious to see your version, with stripes!
hi there! i found your blog while searching for directions on the helena culottes pattern. I’m very new to sewing. I like to challenge myself and i ended up loving this pattern and wanting to make it. I’m struggling though because i can’t figure out which waistband belongs where. I know it’s been 5-6 years since you posted this on your blog and I don’t know if you’re still reading this (I hope so though!). Thanks in advance! ps. I’m a dutchie too 😀
I didn’t see the notification of your comment, but I’m still reading them! Thanks for reaching out.
Since it’s been a fair few years, I don’t exactly remember what I did, but I grabbed my old pattern pieces and had a look – sadly the pants have since perished.
I believe my theory at the time was that the waistband piece on pages A4-B4 was for the left side of the pants, with the right side being wrongly labeled as front but should be back. The waistband piece on pages D3-D4 was for the right side and has a buttonhole to close at center front, and therefore is a little longer. I apparently chose not to put a button in, but just a hook & eye situation.
I hope that helps and good luck with the project!