Refashioning: Old Lady Pants into Skinny Pants

Updating a pair of pants is pretty easy, but there are some important things you need to look for first.

I really liked the color of these Kathy Ireland (remember that brand from the 90s?) blue velvet pants that were on the Goodwill dollar rack. Velvet is having a moment right now. The legs were way too roomy, but notice how the legs are straight--not flared. That's the first thing to look for.

I put a pair of my favorite skinny pants over them. You can see all the extra fabric along the insides of the legs. If you are wanting to do this project, you can't do it with flare pants. I mean, you can, but you will have to take fabric off both sides of each leg (because flare pants flare out both sides), and that is really hard unless you have another specific situation....Which I shall explain in the next picture.

Okay, see how the inner seam here is just a regular seam with no top-stitching? Let me show you an example of top-stitching in the next picture...

Here is an example of a pair of pants with top-stitching. It's a "flat feld" seam to be exact. Anyways, in order to fix flare pants with flat feld seams (which most of them have, at least in the inner seam), you would have to take all the seam work out--which is at least three rows of stitching per seam. Why all the trouble? Because the top half of flare pants are generally pretty form fitting and you would ostensibly be fixing only from the knee down on both sides. It would look super awkward to sew a normal seam into a flat feld one. You'd get a weird bend in the seams on either sides of your knees. Anyways, that's way too much work, and when I saw the afore-mentioned blue velvet ones, I knew that they wouldn't take much work to fix!

Okay, another thing to be mindful of: the back of the leg is a bigger pattern piece than the front. You can see where my fingers are pointing. On either side of the leg, see how you can see extra fabric creeping up from behind? That is because most people have more dimension on the back sides of their bodies than the front. (If you didn't, you'd look weird.) Anyways, I have seen these "Make Skinny Pants from Your Old Pants" blog posts before, and they don't take into account the percentages of back panel to front panel, and they end up making the front panels too slim and the backs too large. This is because as a pattern is graded (made bigger or smaller), the grader deals with percentages, not just making the shape bigger. Anyways, if I flattened the inner seam and cut the inner seam portion away as a 2 dimensional object, the back panel would be end up being much larger than the percentages you see here, and it would look super "Amateur Hour" when I finished.

So here is how I compensated. I pulled the crotch up!

Then, I laid the red pants on top as a guide for pinning.

I sewed along the pins.

When I tried them on, I realized that the leg on the right side of the screen was tighter than the left. You can especially see between the two pins that it's tighter. What I should have done was to pin one leg, sew it and test it, and then cut both legs to the same measurement before sewing the other leg. That would have saved time. No matter. It's a learning experience!

So what I did was to cut the seam down on the good leg.

Then, I matched up both legs, one on top of each other.

And then cut the bottom leg to match the top one.

You can see here how "off" my sewing was! By almost 1/2 an inch!

I sewed up the second leg. . .

And took out the tighter of the two seams.

I had a ton of fuzzies now, so I took some packing tape and rubbed them all off.

Matching legs.

Below you can see the pants before and after. 

The End!!!

Modification: Update Your Trouser Jeans

I have about five pairs of the trouser jeans you see below. I love them, but they are sooooo 2005. I tried to sell two of them on eBay since they are really nice Uniqlo jeans that I bought in South Korea, but no one ever bought them. Then I got an idea. If you have any old 90s or early 2000s wide leg jeans, you can do this too. It takes about 10 minutes.

You can only do this well if you can find a seam down the outer seam or inseam of your pants that isn't top stitched. Usually, it will be the outer seam, and the inseam will be top stitched like below:

This is the outer seam. See the difference? See how you can see stitches over the seam above, but you can't below?

NOTE: If your jeans are top stitched on both sides, you are out of luck with this project. It's hard to explain why if it's not already apparent to you. Just trust me.

Then, turn the pants inside out and grab a pair of skinnier jeans. 

Align the inseams of both pairs of pants. 

You are only going to use the skinny jeans as a guide, not a pattern. Instead of cutting all the way close to them, you are going to allow for the grain of the trouser jeans' fabric. If you look at the lower leg in the picture below, I have denoted the grain of the fabric with yellow lines and then shown you where I actually cut with a red line. It's kind of hard to explain, but if you cut too much into the grain of the jeans from here, the outer seam is going to look weird because it will be cut on the bias which will make it stretch slightly compared to the inseam. Suffice to say, if you cut too much into the grain of the fabric, it will be a dead giveaway that these were "DIY" pants. (A potential way to fix this would be to even the cutting up along the inseam; however, if you do, you need to cut all the way up the inseam from the feet to the crotch and sew a brand new inseam yourself. Remember how I mentioned that inseams are usually top stitched? This is to add bulk for durability's sake, but  if you want to make really skinny jeans, it would be better to do away with the original top stitched inseam all together than to try to cut the inseam from the feet to the knee only. It's really hard to explain. If you do the latter "feet to knee" option, you will have a weird bulge from the bulk of the original top stitching. Just trust me.) Just try to follow the grain with your scissors on the outer seam as much as possible. Then, simply sew up your cut seams.

Before:

After:

What I made aren't really skinny jeans--more like straight leg or boyfriend cut.

I know I got super wordy up there trying to explain myself, so if I lost you, just follow these simple directions:

1. Find a seam that is not top stitched on your jeans (usually the outer seam).

2. Turn your jeans inside out and lay a skinnier pair on top of them.

3. Using the skinnier pair as a guide (rather than pattern), follow the grain of the fabric as you cut, and then sew up the seams.

4. (Optional for really skinny jeans: cut away the entire inseam, and then even up the grain of the fabric on the outer seam so the grain goes straight down the leg.)

Here's another "Before and After":

The End!