Railcar Donna: 11 Feb. 2013

***This may or may not be the last update on her project. It remains to be seen whether or not we will continue this blog together. Hope for the best…***

3Sixteen Update 31 Dec. 2012

I lost track of the number of days these have been worn.

It’s pretty difficult to capture the color correctly, but in person they look very dark – almost – black – and have electric blue fades coming through. If they weren’t so tight in the crotch region they’d get much more wear.

 

LVC 1966 501

I bought this pair (my third pair!) earlier in the month for a whopping $42 – the same price as a pair of current 501s that can be found in department stores everywhere.

These didn’t seem very exciting on the rack until I noticed the little details – bartacked back pockets, noticeable taper, chainstitched hem, and, my favorite part, a greencast weft. The greencast weft should produce some very nice vintage fading.

These are tagged 36×32, but since they are one-rinse, they fit to their post-soak size of roughly 34×30. A 30-minute cold soak only shrank the waist half an inch while all other measurements did not change.

One of the main reasons for picking these up was because they fit much more comfortably in the lap than the 3Sixteens. One of the ridiculous reasons was because I had already purchased two pairs a month ago and loved them so much I just wanted more.

Yolo.

Pre-soak (10 Dec. 2012):

 

~20 days of wear:

 

Styled with an LVC Type I Sawtooth and an LVC Painted Leaf belt (more on those soon).

Railcar Update 12/30/12

They’re usually worn about twice a week but are already starting to show signs of fading – it was hard to capture in the pictures, but we’ll try to get details up soon.

 

Styled with a Jean Shop selvedge chambray (more on that later) and Minnetonka moccasins.

Forgot one.

Keeping up.

It’s been a hectic couple weeks since the last update. Last weekend we went up to Fresno for a wedding and this weekend we went up to Utah to visit the lady’s family. Sadly, the Railcars got left behind in Fresno and missed plenty of good photo ops. Somewhere along the weekend we managed to find a couple moments to snap photos. HOWEVER. The one day we found time to shoot, I was wearing my other pair in the rotation – a pair of Levi’s 201 replicas from the Levi’s 201 line, not the LVC version. That being said…

**No idea how many days these have on them anymore.

 

 

The 3Sixteens went in to get hemmed (lockstiched, not chainstitched since they’re not a repro jean) and came back freshly ironed straight and flat. I guess they thought they were doing me a solid. They were quickly re-broken in playing a twenty minute game of frisbee tag with little kids.

 

See you next week.

Idyllwild.

So, I didn’t mention it, but I am currently working on a pair of 3Sixteen x Barneys SL-BNY1 which is a slim straight leg fit. I needed something to hold me over until the superfuture heavyweight denim championship pt. 2 in April and these were lying around in the closet.

Anyway, we decided that the best way to break these jeans in would be out hiking. We took them with us on a trip to Idyllwild, CA for GF’s birthday.

Here’s the trip in pictures:

3Sixteens have 5 days, Railcars have 4 days at this point.

3Sixteen:

Railcar:

Fits on the way home:
3Sixteens. They need to get hemmed.

Railcars.

Misc:

Railcar Custom Donna

So, we decided that for the GF’s birthday, she’d get a custom pair of raw selvedge jeans made to wear for a year. We turned to Railcar Fine Goods because they use American Cone Denim and are located about an hour away. After a long process, here is the final product:

The initial fit (we were too tired and excited to make these look sharp):

Initial impression:
The Cone denim is nice. We opted for a 13.75 oz. (I think) redline non-stretch selvedge. Because she’s so curvy, it took a lot of back-and-forth to make sure the fit was right. When she first tried them on they fit very snug. We wanted the jeans to be straight from the calf down but she has a little trouble sliding them on and off because the leg opening is so small (not that I mind helping). Otherwise she loves how high the rise is. The denim isn’t too thin nor too thick. When we went down to the Railcar workshop we were impressed at how small the workforce is and how well the jeans were put together. There weren’t very many extra threads falling out when the jeans arrived. The thick leather patch is sewn on sturdy. One think I liked is that the hems are chainstitched. Big ups to Steven from Railcar for making it happen.

We both started our project on Nov. 5th.