Slashed Sleeve Top and Casual Pants

Sometimes I decide I need to make more 'normal' clothes, without over-the-top colours. It is useful to have some basic casual clothes in your wardrobe, and what's more simple and casual than dark grey pants and a fairly neutral colour top? So these two items are an attempt at simple and casual.

Observe the lovely weeds I chose to stand next to

 The pants are Burda young 7050, which have a fitted waist and thigh and then flared lower leg. I always find Burda patterns pretty easy to follow, except for the instructions on how to sew the fly, I avoid making pants because the instructions for the fly are always confusing.  Does anyone have and good tutorials on how to do them? Please leave me any recommendations if you do, then I might not be so scared of making pants. 


Having short legs I had to cut off about two inches of fabric from the pattern's original length. The original pattern was long enough that I could have stood right on my toes and the hem would still scrape the ground, so just a little bit
too long!

The fabric is just a simple dark grey cotton drill I bought from a small fabric, rug, and slippers shop (strange mix!) in Benalla in rural Victoria. I was doing fieldwork for uni in the town, and found the shop during a free afternoon at the end of my week. Even luckier, the owner had decided to stop selling fabric in the future because it wasn't making him enough money, so to get rid of what he had left, he was selling it all for $5 a metre. I probably bought more than was sensible.


Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the blue and white striped with strawberries fabric I used for the pockets. 

For the top, I used a fabric I bought on sale at Tessuti. It's a soft apricot and mauve striped-ish cotton elastane jersey, so it has some colour and a nice but not overwhelming print.

I wanted the top to be a bit loose but not big, and long enough that it covered my waistband, ending pretty much on the top of the hip bone. I made this without any pattern, and really without all that much of a plan, just a picture in my head of how it was meant to look. The basics of it are very simple, just two big rectangles for the main part of the top and two smaller rectangles for the sleeves. The sleeves themselves, though, were a bit fiddly.


I've seen slashed backs and sleeves on tops and dresses for a while, and decided to try it out on the sleeves of this. I probably should have planned what I wanted better, but I just grabbed my scissors and cut. Trying to sew the edges of seven bands on each sleeve was tedious, and dealing with all the thread ends even worse! I also stitched the middle of each band together so that they'd stay sleeves and not all fall off my shoulders completely.

So while both of these were meant to be more normal, they weren't completely simple to make. Some day I'll learn how to do a fly properly, and some day I won't do overly fiddly things like these sleeves.