Charlie Chinos: who wants some new trousers?

April 18, 2021

We've just published FreeSewing v2.15 and it comes with a new pattern: The Charlie Chinos trouser pattern.

I have lost track of how long a chino trouser pattern has been on my to-do list, but it's measured in years. I'm very happy I finally landed where I wanted to be.

I have a picture of it here, but due to the dark fabric, you can't really make out much:

So instead, let me tell you about why I am so excited about this.

Based on Titan

First up, Charlie is based on Titan, our unisex trouser block that is also the foundation for our Paco pattern. So if you're familiar with any of those, you already know how Charlie will fit you.

More measurements, more options, better fit

As a token of how much I feel this is an improvement, I've deprecated Theo. Based on an Aldrich draft, Theo uses very few measurements, and while that worked fine for a certain set of people, it's a less versatile pattern.

Charlie will adapt better to differently shaped bodies, and has a hell of a lot more options that allow you to configure your trousers so you get them just as you like. In case you're wondering, Theo has 5 options, whereas Charlie has 31.

That being said, we will keep Theo available. Deprecated merely means that we've added a little warning message saying that we recommend Charlie instead.

Easier to make

Another reason to opt for Charlie rather than Theo: Charlie is easier to make. It has a more straight-forward fly and waistband construction, and the front pockets have been cleverly designed to give you the ease of construction that comes with side-seam pockets, yet the classic look of slanted pockets.

Theo ranks 4 stars on our difficulty scale, and I've given Charlie 3 stars. If you were afraid of making trousers, this might be the pattern you've been waiting for.

Real pockets

Charlie is a unisex pattern and the pockets are real. You have welt (aka jetted) pockets at the back, and slanted pockets at the front. In both cases, you have control over the size and depth of the pockets.

The front pockets deserve a special mention. They look like traditional slanted pockets, but are set in on the side seam. To make that possible, the back panel of the trousers wraps around the front, following the pocket slant.

Other 2.15 news

Charlie is the main act, but there's a lot of work that went in this 2.15 release.

As always, the changelog has all the details, but allow me to highlight some of the more noteworthy changes:

• We have a new bartack plugin
• The buttons plugin provides new buttonhole-start and buttonhole-end snippets
• The dimension plugin provides a new rmad macro
• The logo plugin now supports dark mode
• Titan and Paco have a new waistbandHeight option
• Core no longer rounds point coordinates to avoid misses when using path.split
• Bella has a fix to the shoulder to better accommodate doll-sized clothing
• Charlie is the first pattern to list some of the absolute dimensions when configuring a pattern, but we plan to extend this to other designs We have documented the new raise methods for designers who want to utilize this feature.
• Speaking of documentation, the examples in our documentation for developers now allows you to toggle a switch to reveal the points and paths in the examples
• The part.getId() method now takes a prefix argument