Fitting Jeggings (How to tailor your waistband)

Sometimes you find the perfect pants, but they aren't fitting perfect.

I found these elastic waistband jeggings with a too-lose-waist. But after a little tweaking, they were tailor made for me.

I Found a pair of Jeggins on clearance for $5 at Target the other day.

Which is awesome not only because its a great deal, but also because many of my pants don't fit me any more with my new "after baby body" I've been working on.

Thing is, these pants didn't fit me right either.

They fit perfect in the legs, but they were big in the waist.

No problem.

Thats an easy fix.

I'm gonna show you how to do it too.

And this will work on anything with an elastic waist band that you want to adjust.

You need a seam ripper

Now,

Take your seem ripper and open the seam where you can get to the elastic waist band.

If you've never used a seam ripper, all you need to do is slide the pointy end under a stitch and just keep sliding till the seam hits the end and rips.

Do this to all those little stitches until you have the whole seam open.

And pull out the elastic.

Now go try it on and pull the elastic as tight as you want it to be.

(There is a fine line between just right and too tight, you don't wanna make a muffin-top look.

So work on finding just the right place)

Mark your new spot it with a safety pin.

Cut the extra off, making sure you leave enough room to sew a seam.

(See how on the original seam there is some extra space? Leave about that much extra room for your new seam.)

Now sew the elastic back together again.

(Just so you know, this can be done without a sewing machine by hand stitching. This isn't so much sewing that it would be overwhelming to do without a machine, but it is faster to use the machine.)

Before you sew it, you want to make sure the elastic didn't get twisted up at all inside the pants. Just run your hand along the whole waist band, while you keep a hold of the lose ends, and make sure it feels flat. If its twisted anywhere, straighten it out. Now you are good to sew.

You will want to do an extra seam just to make sure its nice and secure so it won't rip apart later.

Then just pull on the waistband to get the elastic back into place.

And now you have a band that fits you.

All you need to do now is close the opening back up.

This part you have to do by hand. The machine won't work.

Just slide the needle in one side, across to the other side and pull tight. Do this all the way up until you close up the hole.

And voila!

You have tailored your pants (skirt, whatever you can get your hands on) to fit!

Awesome huh?

:)

Who know you could spend $5 and have a tailored fit?

(There is all that extra elastic I didn't need.)

I will be doing more posts on altering clothes. Along with lots of other sewing.

To play along at home, you will need to know how to use a sewing machine for most of them. So I hope you know your way around the machine.

If you don't I wanna try and sell you on picking up the skill.

Its such a worthwhile skill to have, and its not as hard as it seems.

If you can learn just the basics of how to thread the machine and how to run it as it stitches, you can basically change your world. There is no end to ways it can save you money and allow more creativity, personality and custom fits into your home, wardrobe, and life.