Animal Trouble…

I’ve had some animal trouble dear readers.

First, I finished my lovely rainbow zebra jeans…and they didn’t fit.

!ӣ$%^&*(!!! Quoth Fairy.

Why didn’t they fit?  My own stupid fault of course.  I’m usually too impatient for toiles, but I had already had a bash using the Style Arc ‘Misty’ with the back crotch adapted from the ‘Flat Bottom Flo’.  I’ve been wearing the resulting jeans to death [remember the Narsty Thing Disaster?] and they’ve actually got quite a lot  bigger, so I had to take them in.

This was my downfall.  If you remember, I’d decided to allow for the zebra fabric being non-stretch by adding on an inch or so to the side seams, to allow for tweaking. [Not twerking, I don’t twerk you’ll be pleased to know]

When I realised how much I needed to take in the stretch jeans, I rashly decided to chop that extra fabric off.  Oh dear.  I ploughed on, very happy with the look and finish of these jeans, fully underlined in cotton lawn.  Well, not surprisingly, I could barely drag them on.  I got them up, but felt decidely crushed, and my bum looked  a very odd shape. [SHUT UP!!!]

Sad, dispirited, tired Fairy, abandoned jeans in high dudgeon.  I even wondered if I should put them by against the distant future day when I might be less fat…yeah right.  So that was my first bit of animal trouble.

At 4am this morning, I woke up and ventured downstairs for some painkillers [arthritic hip since you ask].  No kitties.  None.  Now as the new guy hasn’t yet been trusted to venture into the great outdoors, this was a little odd.  I assumed he was back hiding under the bed, and resumed my slumbers.

8am.  Wife in frenzy:  no kitty.  New guy has managed to get out through the cat flap which was presumed to be locked, and has not returned.  I got THE LOOK. And there were many tears…  Animal trouble #2.

Wife gets dressed, jumps into car and drives round neighbourhood.  I print off loads and loads of Lost Cat flyers.  I then spend a considerable amount of time going round our almost mountainous neighbourhood, braving the horrors of over-sprung letter flaps, dog poo ridden drives, and an increasingly upset wife.

By the time I trudged back, huge blister on my heel and huge bruise on my hand [from the letter flaps], I was delighted to see wife trudging down our steep back garden, struggling kitty in arms.  He’d been hiding under one of her sheds, and had ignored all the previous calls and entreaties.  As they do.  [Yes, ‘sheds’, she has three]

Wife calmed, I returned to the thorny issue of the zebra jeans.

I was coming to the conclusion that the only fix would be an unsightly gusset at the sides, when a brain wave hit:  DESIGN OPPORTUNITY!  Insert a stripe down the side of each leg!  There wasn’t enough of the fabric left, I’d bought the end of a roll from Fancy Silk Store.  A bit of a stash rummage later, I realised that I’d made enough green bias strips when doing the DK jacket to work for this.  I wondered about using bias, then thought that it’ll help give a teensy bit of stretch for ease…

I backed it with bias strips of the white lawn to keep the insides tidy and balance the fabric weights.  Then I unpicked lots and lots of overlocking.  Yuck.  The actual sewing and hem finishing only took half an hour though…and THEY FIT!

I like these, and will make more [in stretch fabric, ahem.]

I didn’t worry too much about pattern matching, but I did make sure that my back pockets had symmetrical zebras…

and I’m ridiculously happy at the accidental appearance of a 7-legged zebra at CB.  Cool!

I know they’d have been better without the need for the side stripe, but they do make me smile!

Do you wear anything with animals on?  Would you, or am I crazy?