Fit vs How you feel wearing your clothes

Maybe I'm totally off base here, but how can you say something fits if you don't feel good wearing it?   This is something I've come to terms with over the last couple years while trying to make a decent pair of pants for myself.  I've talked a lot about this process over the years as I shared my trials & errors, disappointments & semi-accomplishments, but it always came back to one thing, even if I was happy with the finished product at the time, I never wore it in public.  They "fit" (according to all fit rules) but they didn't make me feel good.  In fact they made me feel like I was wearing a tent.  I'm a big gal, so I don't go for skin tight, but I also don't want clothes that I feel like I'm drowning in.

Many of the pants I made, in order to get them as wrinkle free as possible, I had to lengthen the crotch which made the crotch sit about 3 inches lower than where I wanted it.  I had to add width to the hips and thighs making the legs very wide; which also added inches to the waist.  To fit them to my waist I had to put in multiple darts, which looked like pleats, which emphasized my stomach making me look much bigger than I already was.

I kept going back to my RTW jeans, and wondering why what I was making was so far from my RTW jeans.  And then I realized it was because I wasn't makeing jeans; I was making slacks and there's a big difference.  I don't wear slacks and even though they "fit" I wasn't comfortable in them.

So this year I decided to change direction and instead of trying to turn a slacks pattern in to a jeans pattern, I took apart a pair of RTW jeans and created a pattern from them.   There's still a little bit of work to do, but this is as close as I've gotten to what I was hoping to accomplish in the first place and I feel good in them.  If I feel good in them, I'm going to wear them; even if they may not "fit" perfectly.

 Excuse the mess in the pics.  It's my daughter's room.