A plethora of pants and the economies of scale in sewing

The boyfriend is always asking me why I don't save time by picking one pattern and 'churning out' loads of the same garment at one time. (I should say that his main hobby is brewing, in which the economies of scale are rather more applicable than in sewing - double the ingredient = double the amount of beer, with very little more effort). I normally roll my eyes at him when he says this, try to explain about how sewing work, while pointing out that I don't want all my dresses or tops to be the same shape and style. However, it hit me last week that there are some items that making multiple version of could work; pants, as in under.

I've been storing up my left over stretch fabric and lace for a while now planning to turn it into undies, and this weekend I got stitching. As I knew I had enough to make half a dozen pairs I though thought this might be an occasion to test out the economies of scale in sewing.  

I have two patterns for pants, both of which I've used before, one for 2 way stretch fabric (from The Secrets of Sewing Lingerie) and one for 4 way stretch fabric (Butterick B6031).  Taking the methodical approach I sorted and pressed the fabrics (3 lots for each pattern) and matched them with the stretch lace and thread.

Sorry poor light for this photo

It was at this point I hit a slight stumbling block - my threads were all different colours. This meant it wouldn't be possible to do each step to all three pairs at the same time, without a large amount of fiddly swapping on thread. Instead I would have to make one pair after another.

Over Saturday and Sunday afternoons I 'churned out' six pairs of pants. Doing all the cutting, followed by all the sewing. I can't say for certain it was quicker than making six pairs separately on six different occasions as I've never timed make one pair, but I think it might have done. The pants are fairly simple to make, and by the time I'd got to the third pair I didn't even have to think about the next step, I was on auto pilot.

So lucky me I now have six new pairs of fancy pants, I especially like the black and white stripes with silver lace! Also, I now have two matching pant and t-shirt combinations. Not so luckily, it would seem that the boyfriend might have had a point, and that in some cases 'churning out' loads of the same project in sewing can save time!