Sewing White Jeans

As I rarely wear white clothes (not my color, and too hard to keep clean), I don't usually sew with white.  So this project, sewing a pair of jeans that are not just white, but blindingly white, has been interesting!  Some white tips I'm learning as I go:

• pre-wash alone or with all whites! 
• Wash hands and clean work surfaces before sewing. 
• Clean iron so it doesn't have hard-water stains or dye from other fabrics on it. 
• Cover dingy ironing board with a fresh layer of muslin, so as not to transfer stains. 
• Don't leave pins in too long lest they mark the fabric! 
• Keep tea and cocoa in another room... don't drink and work (unless I want the jeans to end up the color of my teeth!)

Here's a picture of the natural skew of the denim after washing.  As I mentioned last time, I found it impossible to true denim, and ended up matching selvedges and ignoring cross-grain in order to avoid buckling in the fold. 

A couple inches of skew.

One thing I've noticed is that white fabric, even thick white denim, is often still transparent.  You don't notice at first, but when you put another layer behind and it gets more opaque, you see it.  This is why women shouldn't wear white bras under white shirts: the two layers of white make a stronger white and you still see the bra.  Instead, a flesh-toned bra is better, since that's not noticeable.  Having finished the front of the pants, I began to wonder if next time I shouldn't use flesh-toned fabric for pockets!  I wonder if my client has flesh-toned chonies? 

​Speaking of pockets, remember the pocket facings from the charcoal jeans?  I used the same technique of bias binding to cover the raw edges, but this time I curved the edge, which was much easier to sew than a beveled corner: 

Sewing binding down. See the corner poking out? I trim that before doing the seam back. This is the left pocket.

The finished pocket facing. This is the right pocket (you can see the smaller coin pocket).

The pockets got embroidered with a V-shaped motif I borrowed from the button my client chose for the front.  I used two different thread weights to vary the design lines: