I’m going to start off by saying I love the Barb Pant pattern. There are only a few changes I’ve made and I’m really very impressed with it. When I tried them on for my hubby and son, I got ‘Wow.’ and ‘Sweet’, respectively.

There were a couple of changes I made though. There was an excess of material at the center back of the pants. I know that’s my shape causing that. So, one of my changes was to put a couple of darts in the back of the pant, below the waist. For my next pair, I will put the dart into the pattern and then have a nice smooth look to the back of the pant. They don’t look quite as flattering hanging backwards on Catherine.

You can see the one dart on the back quite clearly. It has a twin on the other side, but it looks more like a fold of material in the photo. My bottom also fills them out more so the darts don’t pucker at the bottom like they do in the photo above.

This photo also shows the other change I made. After taking off the waistband (which I had sewn on and then overlocked to keep the edges from fraying), I decided I really didn’t like the waistband how it was. Being rather curvy, I needed to take in the elastic on the waistband which produced wrinkles. And it just wasn’t a look I loved. As I said last week, to me, it had a sweat pants look.

So what I did on these is I put the elastic in the back of the waistband only. You can see in the photo above I enclosed it even with a double row of stitching.

Above you can see the elastic pinned on to the waistband. I didn’t measure, just made it the length of the waistband – which is a size smaller than the pant size I used. That was one of the other changes I made to the waistband.

And now the elastic is all tucked in and secured. I saw this on a pair of RTW pants I own and decided to give it a try. And I really like this.

See how much smoother the front of the pants are without the elastic? These are a Ponte and have some stretch, so this method will work for these, but a less giving material probably won’t allow these same changes.

There are a couple of puckers in the above photo at the waistband in the front that a couple of 1/4″ darts in the pattern would fix.

For comparison, here was the waistband before I took it off and made the changes. I really prefer the smoother front.

I’ve worn these pants a number of times, and they’re really comfortable. The Barb Pant will be on my list to sew again. And I’ll do my best to get a photo of me in them so you can see what they look like on.

Happy creating!