I’ve made a piece of underwear! They’re Thread Theory’s Comox Trunks and I made them for my brother.
Clearly, the best part of these trunks is the elastic! I don’t have a lot of elastic in my stash and what I had didn’t feel nice enough to sit next to your skin all day long. I wasn’t very optimistic about finding anything really nice and then stumbled upon this elastic in a stall at a local weekly market. It feels very soft and it has stars on it! They also carried several different colours. Just brilliant.
These trunks were easy to make but I didn’t follow all of the construction steps. The attachment of the binding pieces to the fly seemed a bit fiddly so I simply folded the binding strips in half and used my overlocker to attach them to the front pieces. This does leave an exposed seam inside the fly but since I suspect most men don’t even use the fly I don’t think this will be a problem.
I sewed the inside front pieces wrong sides together. As a result the seam allowance ended up inside the fly and not on the inside of the trunks, so there is one exposed seam less that might cause irritation. With hindsight I should also have done this with the binding piece for this front piece because that seam did end up on the inside of the trunks and could easily have been hidden as well.
To further reduce the number of exposed seams I used a different method for the attachment of the gusset. I now wish I had taken pictures as I worked but I promise I’ll do so if I make them again. Basically, you skip the part where the gusset pieces are basted wrong sides together and instead work with two separate pieces. Layer the two pieces right sides together with the front (or back, doesn’t matter which side you start with) sandwiched in between. Sew this seam. Then, leaving the gusset pieces right sides together stuff the entire trunks inside the gusset pieces (fabric is allowed to spill out through the sides of the gusset) until you can layer the gusset pieces right sides together with the back sandwiched in between. Make sure nothing else is caught in between and sew this seam. Now, you can pull the trunks right side out through one of the gusset’s sides, et voila, you have hidden both seams on the inside! It feels a little bit like magic. If you have constructed yokes on classic tailored shirts you might have used this technique before.
I used my coverstitch machine (4 threads) to attach the elastic. This worked well, but next time I should pay more attention as I am sewing because I didn’t catch the trunks in all places on the first go and had to do some fixing.
The one thing I didn’t like is how the pattern pieces are printed from the PDF. With a PDF pattern you have to do some assembling after printing and my printer tends to scale when it shouldn’t which can make it difficult to line things up. I, therefore, have a very strong preference for the layout of the pieces to be optimized so that a pattern piece is scattered across the least number of pages possible. In this pattern (PDF for size 24-36), piece 3 could have fit on 1 page instead of 2. Piece 4 could have fit on 2 pages instead of 4 and piece 5 could have fit on 1 page instead of 2. Yes, this does result in the printing of more pages, but it does also result in less taping and less fudging when things don’t line up. On some pieces text runs across the markings that you need to line up the pages which I think is a bit sloppy and could easily have been avoided.

This pattern piece sums up what I didn’t like about the PDF. It is printed across more pages than necessary. Text is placed across the diamond that you need for matching up. The marking that indicates you need to cut this piece on the fold is located right on top of the line that you need to cut for matching up the pages which I found a little confusing. I also had some matching issues, but I fully blame my printer for that problem.
To conclude, I think this is a well drafted pattern that is very quick to make. I did all of the sewing in just one evening. I can’t really say too much about the written instructions that come with the pattern because I barely looked at them. I did read the sewalong blog posts and those were definitely helpful, even if I decided to ignore some of it. The size range of the pattern seems quite large with 24-45. I made size 30 and my brother is positively skinny so I suspect this pattern might also work for teenage sons (if willing to wear mom-made underwear, that is). The pricing of the pattern is also very reasonable as the PDF version is only CAD 7.50.

If you are wondering why I used grey thread in my overlocker the answer is laziness. My coverstitch machine was already threaded with the dark blue thread and I didn’t feel like unthreading it…
Have you ever made underwear? I found these trunks very easy to make and am now thinking that making underwear for myself might not be as difficult as I used to think. Except for bras of course, those are on a completely different level of sewing and fitting.