Sewing for your life!Alterations – New Life for unworn Clothes : Refitting Jeans
After sewing and drafting my own patterns for years now, i realized my wardrobe is nearly bursting. But not only with clothes i wear regularly or love so much i can´t give them away (yet), but also with pieces that hardly see the light of day. I´m a bit on a journey of altering or repurposing things i have. Because let´s be honest, i have a lot of stuff. Not only clothes, but fabrics and yarn. I think it is good to have a stash when times are difficult, but there is a certain tipping point, where it just becomes a bit overwhelming.
The first two projects i want to show you are two trousers/jeans. The first was an ill-considered bad buy, which then i never wore. I do like the look of the trouser, white-blue striped, nice for summer. But it was super-stretchy and not high-waisted (which i prefer nowadays) and had skinny legs…which was never a good look on me.
So what to do, i thought. You can´t really change the rise of a trouser, at least not so that it looks like this was the original form of the trouser. But you can change the width of the legs!
I looked for some insertion lace in my stash (yay stash!) that kinda matched the white stripes. I think i bought that one from a thrift store years and years ago. It was a bit too see through, and i wasn´t going for that look, so i also looked for a bit of white cotton for the upper half of the lace insert.
The main problem i had was to find a lace wide enough to give me some extra room in the legs, but not wide enough, that the width of the waist changed too much. The trouser was stretchy and a bit snug, so i figured i would be happy with a 7cm wide trim ( seam allowance included).
I started with unpicking the overlocker/serger seam of the side seams and the side seam up to the point of the hip depth, which is normally the point where the side seams start curving in again. Then i took a scissor and cut the seams open, thus cutting the seam allowances of the former seams away. I also cut through the waist band. There is a point where you have a bit of an ugly corner, where the unpicked and the cut seam meet, just balance it out ever so slightly.
Apparently i forgot to take a pic of the „opened up“ trouser.
Then i prepared the lace and the cotton fabric. I cut the cotton fabric to the width of the lace and the prefered length, which for me was about to the middle of my thigh + the width of the waistband + seam allowances on top, because i wanted to turn it over at the top with the lace. You can make it as long or short as you want of course. The bottom of my cotton strip got a little hem. For the lace, I also added double seam allowance (would be good if it is the same amount as the hem of the legs) at the bottom for the hem.
Then i layed the lace on top of the cotton, pinned it and serged them together at the top. (The sides come later).
After that i pinned the strip to the open side seam of the trouser. At one side i tried to sew the overlap at the waistband in one go, but that wasn´t really a great idea, so leave that for later. What i also noticed, it is better to sew from top to bottom on both sides, because it can happen that the length of the leg won´t match up again. It can be, that while sewing i stretched it a little bit. And it is better to have that difference at the bottom hem, than at your waistband.
After that you serge your seams allowance and iron downwards + pin + sew the overlap at the waistband. I also topstitched on both side of the lace, so the seam allowance would lay nice a flat.
And this is the finished trouser, which i really like now, and hopefully wear a lot more than before.
My second project is a jeans, which is high-waisted and has nice wide legs and overall i really really love. BUT apparently after the second time washing it (although i got that jeans from a thrift store) shrank like no-ones business. So i just tried the same solution, but this time the legs weren´t the main focus but the waist. I only need a few cm to not feel like a sausage while wearing it.
I didn´t use lace, because i hadn´t anything black, i used some jacquard trim, which looked good with the black-greyish fabric.
The process was nearly the same, but with the difference that i sewed the trim on top of the opened-up trousers, so i wouldn´t loose too much seam allowance. And it is also easier to sew a trim on that way. Which means that after unpicking and cutting, i had to serge the side seams of the jeans before sewing the trim on.
And that is the finished jeans! What do you think? I think it really looks great. How do you alter you clothes to fit you again? I´m always at the look-out for more ideas. Thank you for reading, till next time!
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