I just attempted the Bruce trunks for myself today and it was a hilarious failure, hopefully someone can help me figure out how to adjust.
I am an obese man with a large belly. I try to wear my underwear with the band around my natural waist, rather than on the hips. When I drafted the pattern with my measurements (Hips 47”, Waist to hips 6”, Waist to upper leg 11”, Upper leg circ 26”) it looked odd and too small, but I know this pattern has negative ease for stretchy fabric so I decided to trust the process.
The result was a pair of trunks that was very wide and extremely short. When I tried them on the waistline was about right, but the seat and crotch didn’t even come close to covering me, it was flossing me like the worlds worst g-string. It was very funny.
Any ideas how I can adjust the pattern to fit over my disproportionate anatomy? Should I use the circumference of my waist instead of my hips and increase the “rise” to maximum? Should I remeasure my W.T.H and W.T.U.L? It’s kinda hard for me to tell where my natural hips are because of my belly.
I will definitely increase the leg length slider next time, given that I can just take them in and hem them to the right length.
I love your optimistic attitude about the fit issues!
Yes, using the waist circumference instead of hips would be best, here. (The measurement system implicitly assumes that the waist is the narrowest part of the body. When that is not the case, some work-arounds can be needed.)
I strongly suspect that waist-to-hips and waist-to-upper-leg are only used to calculate hips-to-upper-leg, so I would set waist-to-hips to zero and then your waist becomes the reference point for the rise. Hopefully, this will also fix the cross seam length, which seems to be derived from the rest.
It sounds to me like you may just have suffered from a failure of stretch. Knit fabrics have wildly different stretch percentages, and that very much affects the behavior of the finished product. It sounds like there may not have been any vertical stretch in this one? Or it may not have had enough sideways stretch and that’s what ended up taking up the vertical dimension. It might be worth asking Joost exactly what fabric he uses for the original, and getting him to measure stretch percentage as at least a starting point.
Apart from that, let me recommend J Stern Design’s fitting videos on youtube. I’ve had much better success with her big belly adjustments than any other.
If you prefer to wear your underwear at natural waist height, then that should not really pose a problem, but to get good results, you’ll need to keep in mind how the design works.
It uses your hip circumstance as the baseline fir how wide to make them.
So if you want to use your natural waist, set your hip circumference to your natural waist (you can create a specific measurements set for this).
Then, the vertical dimension is all about the value of the hips to upperlegs distance. Which in turn is calculated from waist to upperlegs & waist to hips.
So, you should enter your waist to upperlegs as the actual value and then set waist to hips to zero.
This will essentially replace the hips with the waist in the design.
I apologize that this is a bit involved, but I hope it works out for you.
