Sewing Jeans, part 2

I finished the back of the jeans in part 1.  Now it's on to the front!

The front has lots of pieces.  So many that it's hard to come up with the right names for all of them (since I'm drafting my own pattern and don't have the luxury of pre-named pieces).  Besides the two large front pieces, here's what we have:

Fly facing
Fly shield
Coin pocket
Side front
Pocket
Pocket facing

I cut my pocket and pocket facing out of some leftover quilting fabric, partly to add a fun colorful touch to my jeans but mostly because that's what I had on hand.  I cut the pieces with the lengthwise grain going across the body, and the pockets extend from the side seam all the way into the center front seam allowances.  This should reduce the stretch across my stomach and hold everything in, right?

Of course since I'm not following a pattern I started putting the pockets together in the wrong order.  I should have sewn the coin pocket to the side front, serged the curved edge, then sewn that piece to the pocket.  I ended up sewing the side front to the pocket first, then realized I needed to finish the curved edge so I did using a decorative stitch, then I attached the coin pocket.  Lesson learned.  Next time I'll do it right.

There's my really cute pocket!  Next I stitched the pocket facing to the jeans front along the pocket opening, turned, pressed and topstitched.  I attached the pockets to the pocket facings with a french seam along the bottom edge.  Then I basted the pockets to the fronts along the front edges.  

the WRONG way to offset the seam allowances at center front

I pretty much followed the directions from my basic pants pattern for the center front / fly.  That pattern didn't have jeans-style topstitching so it didn't go as smoothly as I hoped but it worked out in the end.  Of course I didn't take notes on how I SHOULD have done it so I get to figure it out again next time!  One of the tricky parts was getting the center front and center back seams to meet at the crotch.  The center back was between the lines of topstitching and the center front was along the edge of the fly.  I compensated for this by having the center front seam allowances match right below the fly, then offset the seam allowances below that so that at the inseam they were the same as the center back: 3/8" seam allowance for the left side, 7/8" for the right side.  Of course when I worked all that out in my head I had the left and right mixed up.  I even wrote down the wrong directions so I wouldn't get confused, I followed those directions, and I sewed the pieces together wrong.  The above picture is proof.  But it only took a couple minutes to realize my error and correct it.

And here is my finished jeans front!  I'm so excited that it really looks like a pair of jeans!  The finished product is coming soon...