In this article, I shall describe the making of the hakama, the Japanese skirt pants.
Here's the pattern. Because I make mine out of Trigger, the pattern is 60" wide,
instead of 45" like the other patterns. Measure from where your waist is (That's the waist where
you'll actually wear the hakama) to the ground). On me, that's 42", which is why the leg pieces
are that length. You use your own measurement. The front waistband must be long enough to
wrap around you twice with enough left over to tie. That's why there's those waste pieces
on the pattern, for those who are short and wide. The square piece on the end of the rear
waistband is a crotch gusset. We cut it fron the rear waistband because the rear waistband only
has to go around the body once and ite, so it's shorter than the front waistband.
Here are the pieces cut out. Don't worry that I've pieced together my waistbands. I just use a lot of navy trigger, so I always have scraps around.
We begin by putting the 2 rear legs right sides together, making sure that the selveges are also together. Then we put in a pin 15" down from the top edge.
Sew the seam to the pin.
Then we do the same with the front leg pieces.
Take the rear pieces, and place pins 7" in from each selvege.
Pleat the rear pieces, moving the pins you put in to the center seam. Put in pins to hold the pleats in place.
And here's the edge view.
Now sew along the top of the rear pieces, close to the edge. This will be covered up later, but we want to hold the pleats in place without the pins.
Now we're going to pleat the front. This is a bit more complicated. Here's the pattern for the pleats at the front. Put a pin in the top edge of the front wherever there is a measurement. Because we've used some width for the seam allowance at center front, the measurements don't come out exactly. That's why the last pleat is marked 'remainder'. Measure 4" in from each edge, and measure the rest of the pins from the center, and whatever's left for the last pleat is whatever is left.
And here's what it looks like with the pins in.
Starting with the pleat closest to the center, plate the fabric so that the pin closest to the center is at the center, and put another pin there to hold it in place.
Continue pleating, but in this case, we move the next pin to another pin, rather than to the center. We end up with 4 pleats. The innermost 3 on one side expose 1" of fabric, and the last exposes 4". So our front is now 14" across.
Now we can pull all our marking pins...
...and sew across the top like we did with the back.
Now we get the waistbands ready. We first turn each long edge over and iron it down.
Then we fold the whole waistband in half the long ways, making sure to put our freshly-pressed
edges inside, and iron again. Here's what that looks like opened up./p>
And closed.
We sew the waistbands on the same way in the front and the back. Make sure that the short waistband is sewn to the back. Put a pin in the center of one long side of the waistband, and use that pin to center the waistband on the seam of the front or back (we're doing the back here). Put more pins in where you need them, making sure to pin the front or back between the long edges of the waistband.
Just like we did with the lapel of the shitagi, we fold the end of the waistband inward at each end before we sew it.
