The other week I was sitting at dinner out with some friends and I was wearing a pair of my black latex leggings as part of the outfit. Towards the end of the meal I suddenly realised my leggings had spit. Thankfully between my dress and the split being pretty small it wasn't obvious to anyone, not even myself really. My early assessment proved to be correct, a seam had come undone. The best part about that is it's the easiest kind of hole to fix, doesn't need a patch like a tear would as everything already overlaps. So while I repair it, I thought I'd give a bit of a reflection on these leggings.

A Pattern Emerges

The pattern for these is an old one, infact trace back its lineage and it is the very first pattern I used for any latex way back in 2015, just with a few tweaks over the years. Whether these issues come from the original that I bought, or the modifications I did through the years is kinda hard to tell. While I still have a copy of the original, I'm not planning to make it again anytime soon as my measurements have changed and I want things that I make to fit.

These leggings are just a catsuit, cut off at the waist, simple right? In general this is fine to do, and for legs my current pattern hasn't really varied from what I've done here. It's made from 6 pieces, front and back of each leg, and the same for the torso. My newer patterns have the pieces join in a different shape but realistically that is the same outcome.

The Math Just Doesn't Add Up

The biggest issue on these leggings is, as the title might imply, that things don't add up. Take this seam for example: (Sorry about the cat fluff, you try enjoying latex while owning multiple fluffy cats, it doesn't work well) One side of it is 76.87cm and the other side is 72.70cm, so when you glue it all together one end sticks out 4.17cm (1.6 inches) and just doesn't look right. To account for this bad pattern design a simple solution (that you can see I employed here) is to stretch the short side out a bit as you go along to make up for it being shorter. This means that when not being worn the seam will get this ripple as it's all contracted, but when being worn it's all pretty flat and not really noticeable. While I can't say I've empirically tested it, I also imagine it makes it a weaker joint. The short version is it works, but it's not a great thing to do if you can avoid it.

Avoid it you say?

Yes that is what I said... were you not following along? The easiest way to avoid it is just make sure your seams match up. When planning the pattern a lot of the just straight edge ones will match fairly easily, not much modifications required. The curved ones on the other hand always seem to be more complicated, and that's what is wrong in this example. By tweaking the curves you can smooth out a lot of these, if they are too far off you have to tweak where the curves are from and such, but it's not too bad. (Someday I'll make a post more in depth about my patterns) As you can probably tell from the picture above, I like to make my patterns digitally, this makes it super easy to measure the lengths and just add the ones you need together, then you tweak and repeat until everything is the length they should be.

The long and short of it is just if you're aware that it'll be a problem, you can fix it before it becomes one, which I guess is just kinda how it goes in life hey?