These are actually my third Calyer pants

 I was taking seriously my plan to actually use my fancy stash fabrics this year. 

At some point I decided this luscious wool from Geneva should be a pair of Calyer pants. I have an odd relationship with the Calyer pants.  My first pair, I didn't entirely love them...but I sort of did.  The pockets weren't perfect and they are a bit shallow, so not very satisfying to put things in. Yet I wore the first Calyer pants...literally until the butt split open sideways because I had worn the fabric out.  It was a weird fabric too, a wool blend that shrunk and shrunk so the fit was no longer the original fit. 

When I made my second Calyer pants I was sort of disconcerted by the loose fit. I made them from a stretchy fabric and I lengthened the pockets.  The issue with that is that the pocket kind of interferes with my actual thigh, so the extra room in it is still not useful to put things.  I ended up giving them to a friend who uses them for hiking.  I even forgot to blog about them. 

I had kind of forgotten all of this.  So I made Calyer pants (size XS, same as before) from one of my favourite fabrics of all time.  I'm not sure why I rate it so highly.  It was expensive because it was a fabric store in the centre of Geneva, I was there to have my interview with MSF, so maybe it's because of those memories. It's a nice sort of loose weave, not transparent, but hinting at transparency.  I really do love it so much, but I didn't buy enough to really play with, since it was expensive.  (I wanted some patterned silks but they were hundreds of dollars per metre so luckily I held back...) 

And they are too tight. 

 

Luckily one of the friends on my current recipient list is smaller than me by quite a bit. So they went off to her.  I look at the photos and they aren't that bad though the butt is obviously snug, but wearing them, I felt like I might damage them at any moment.  I never expected to have such a long relationship with this pattern, since I disparagingly called it "fancy loungewear" but truthfully I would be tempted to try again at some point, keeping in mind something along the lines of maybe drapey (though that didn't work out super well) and maybe a bit stretchy (but not too stretchy, as those were too big.) 

Another thing I have noticed, and maybe I'm alone in this - that when I use these deep stashed, scary fabrics, even when the results are not exciting and I end up giving the item away - what I feel is a sense of relief.  I'm trapped by the stress of using my beautiful stash to make beautiful, perfect things, and while each inspiration is a step towards a platonic ideal, the act of trying to reach perfection is more important than the result.  I've noticed this over and over again, but only recently has it actually turned into results: I have really cut down on buying expensive fabric when I don't have any idea what to do with it.