These Donna Karan (vogue 1378) trousers were such a jigsaw to me. I made these last year but I’ve only been wearing them this Winter.

There are now some really good reviews on the trousers so here were my alterations.
  
My project challenges
I had to figure out where to shorten these without affecting each piece of this puzzle.
My shapely leg meant some shaping with these trouser pieces.

Not having enough fabric in the same colour to test the first version.

I used a dark purple at the back of the ankles.

This shows where I pinched the centre front seam to lower it without affecting the waistline shaping.

I used anther legging pattern to test the leg shaping.

Then I looked at where I wanted to shorted the pieces but I couldn’t figure out what pieces to shorten. So I numbered each piece to the line drawing.

For the length, well I let that one go because I have shortened the pants at mid thigh level but I knew the bottom pieces still needed to be shortened.

The body curves were adjusted the way I usually adjust trouser curve.  Drop the centre back curve. Lengthen the centre back curve for more room. Shorten the centre front seam.

There wasn’t enough grey ponte so I chose a dark purple ponte and placed that at the back of the calve and as the lower leg facings.

This pattern is pieced together by overlaying the pieces but I did normal seams at the top of the trousers with some topstitching. I kept the overlaying pieces for the lower leg.

Pattern piece changes
Once I’d sewn the leg pieces up, I compared it to my legging pattern and saw I needed to lop off another 3″ off the leg piece. So I’ll save that for another version. The pattern pieces have been adjusted.

And that’s how I made this puzzle work.