Fancy Pants

Back in March, I started looking at Thrift Stores for brown Business pants.  I have a personal pledge not to buy anything at a regular store if I don't need to.  Usually, I can get what I want for a fraction of the price at almost the exact same quality at a Thrift Store or a Garage Sale.  However, these brown pants were hard to find.  I looked all over every month or so, and they never had the style and size that I needed in brown.


Finally, in October, I found some.  I found three pairs, actually.  One of them was a few dollars less than the others and I liked the shade and fit much better, so it seemed like a no-brainer, except for one things: the zipper was shot.  I bought them anyway.

I tried in November to fix the zipper several different ways, but it didn't work.  Finally, in December, I bought a new zipper to replace the old one.


So Project Three is actually getting around to replacing the zipper!

By now, I've lost a little weight, so I also wanted to take them in a bit, and I figured, why not do that while I fix the zipper?

So, the first thing I did was pin down the line of where I wanted the pants to come together when I finished.  I also pinned where I wanted the zipper to fall.  If you look, the right side of the zipper is right inside the flap, so that was my inner pin-line.

Next, I seam-ripped all of it -- the zipper, the flaps, everything I had to.  I kept the waist-band and the zipper-flap intact and just cut the ends of the zipper-halves out.







I cut the excess fabric on the left half (based on my pinning) away from the waistband so that I could fold it over.  I also trimmed some of the edge-hems off so I didn't have bulky hems inside my pants when I was done.

I folded the fabric to line up with the inner pin-line and pinned the zipper just inside this line as well.  Then, I sewed down the edge in triple-duty stitches.

After that, I unzipped the zipper and hand-stitched the other side onto the pants.  The plan was to machine-sew it, but then the stitching would have shown through on the other side of the zipper-flap, so I hand stitched in between the layers instead.

When I was done, it zipped fine, but I had to move the button clasp part over to the left.  After much exasperation, I finally just cut it off and sewed it back on.

In the process of all of this, I cut off the inside flap the kept the zipper from the skin.  The new zipper was also about two inches longer than the old zipper, so even though I inserted it farther into the inseam than the old one, it still has about an inch just chilling in the crotch of the pants.  I decided just to leave it.

 At the end of the day, they worked great.  The pants now fit super well and you can barely tell that they were altered.  The only place where it shows is in the inseam, because the right zipper is slightly higher than the left zipper (oops!).  I probably could have prevented that by hand-sewing the right half while it was still zipped to the left half, but I didn't think about it.  No-one's gonna be looking, anyway!