Hey, you're watching with Wendy and in today's video. I'm going to talk about how to downsize [a] pair of jeans
I lost a bit of weight over the last year, and that's left me with some jeans that don't fit
It sucks to get rid of them when I like them so much, so I'm going to show you how to reduce the waistband
and slim down the leg if you're in a similar situation as me.
I'm going to be taking in the waistband on these pair of boyfriend jeans that I own.
Yes, I understand that as boyfriend jeans they already really lack in the hip department,
but these ones are so loose now that they're at the point where they just looks super saggy,
and they almost can slide off of my hips.
A little bit of tightening at the waist will help them to sit on the hips better and get a little bit closer to my actual waist.
To reduce the waistband we could remove an equal part from the two sides.
That's a bit tricky, because it has to be symmetrical and you run into issues with navigating around the pockets.
You can also take out fabric from the back middle,
but then that brings your two back pockets closer together, which sometimes looks a little unflattering,
so I'm gonna go with the option of putting in two darts directly above the back pocket
Here's the jeans where I'll be slimming down the leg. The hips of them is okay,
but these used to be skinny jeans and are now pretty baggy around the leg area. It makes the butt look pretty unflattering.
And also the legs just look like there's a lot of fabric going on.
Okay, we'll get started with the boyfriend jeans where I'm taking in the waist.
At the front I pinched in enough fabric so that it's fitting comfortably all the way around and still looks ok.
And I measure how much fabric I pinched. In total, I pinched two inches, so I divided that in half and pinned one inch
Directly above the middle of the two back pockets, I pinned these in with safety pins to try them on.
And yes, it's looking pretty good in terms of how much room is on the side. You will have to pay attention though to how much you
pinched in just because these darts are going to make the back pockets sag a little bit
So there's only so much you can pinch before the back pockets start to sag way too much
I was pretty happy with the
two 1 inch sections that I pinched and so I flipped the jeans inside out and use pins to mark out where the directs were going
To go, I put in a regular pin and remove the safety pin
And then flip the fabric so that I was looking at it from a side profile making sure that I've lined up the fold directly
With the middle of the back pocket and pulling on that back pocket to get it out of the way I lay down the fabric
In its folded position and pinned so that I'm creating a diagonal line starting from the very top
Of the back pocket and going up to the point where I had pinched one inch in from the edge
This is where you're going to be sewing with a straight line to make the dart I repeated the exact same steps on the other
back pocket folding it in half
Along the pocket and making sure that pocket fabric is out of the way then putting in the three pin
So that I can mark out the angle of the dark here's how the two darts look
I was double checking that everything was looking symmetrical and straight down the middle of the two back pockets on the outside
You're going to have these two seems
They're not intensely noticeable
But they will be there
and it's an inherent part of taking in the fabric grab your sewing machine and sew
down A
Straight stitch all along the pins starting [from] 1 inch from the top where I had pinched and going down all the way until you
Reach the bottom of the fold which is right where the pocket begins
I used a long stitch length
And that makes it a bit easier to undo the stitches if it turns out that it doesn't look that great after putting in these
Two stitches I gave these jeans
I try just to see if I like to wear the darts were before I go on to the next step if you're feeling lazy
You could stop here, but I'm going to challenge you to finish off
The top Edge of the gene to make it look all professional on my left hand side
It's already done
But I'm going to show you how it's done on the right hand side the first step is to
Undo the dart that you just made but only along the waistband section of that scene now that we've opened up the waistband we're going
To go in again with the seam ripper and start ripping out the seams one inch away from the seam on both sides I do
All the ripping on the inside of the gene and that helps to make sure I'm not damaging the outside of the gene and also
Makes it [easier] to keep the outside of the jeans looking nice open it up
So that you have a hole that goes one inch past the same on both sides the next scene
We have to rip up is the top stitch along the waistband so I go in once again with the Seam Ripper this time going
half an inch out from the seat we can go ahead and push that part open and then flip that piece of
Waistband out of the waist that we're just dealing with the gene and the waistband half that's attached to it on this one side now
we have the jeans with the dart we're going to take a straight stitch and finish off the dart all the way down [to] the
End of the gene making sure everything is unfolded as we go. Here's how it [looks] after sewing all the way down
I
Unfolded the raw Edge at the very top of the waistband and went all the way down with a straight stitch the next part is
To grab the waist band that's been flipped out of the way and give that a straight stitch as well the exact same width on
This side so that it's the same amount of fabric being removed again. Here is the dart that we had so
Carrying it all the way to the [top] of the waistband and here is the other part of the waistband with a matching straight stitch
I cut off the excess fabric on that top piece of waste and and then also cut off the excess fabric on the dart reach
In with your fingers to separate those raw edges of all of the seams and fold the edges that we had unfolded while sewing back
into their original
Position once those are all folded in flip the entire thing so it's back to where we started your waistband should have two halves that
Are meeting each other and covering the same that we just created with the dart go ahead and pin the top Edge and the bottom
Edge then we'll sew in a straight stitch with matching gold Jean thread
And that's how you finish off the waistband so that your darts are completely hidden
I also go into the bottom edge of the dart tie up those loose strings into a knot before
Snipping them off or the jeans that were slimming down pick the side of the leg that has no top stitch
Which is the golden Jean thread for me that was the inside edge of the leg and that's the part that's easier to work with
First you're going to flip the jeans inside out
Which is always a kind of a weird experience
then we're going to go in and pinch the inner leg adding safety pins as we go to help us determine how much fabric we
Need to sew wait here's one of the legs after I finished it
It was kind of nice because it tucked away some worn down fabric on the inner thigh
So I'm gonna replicate this on the other leg
I put in a pin at the bottom of the leg to show me where everything started I pinned to show me at which point
We reached that third of an inch that we were trying to remove and then one more pin near the crotch to show me where
To turn so that I reached the inner crotch from there
I made sure the gene was folded cleanly in half and put it into the sewing machine
Just going with a straight stitch all the way along the leg make sure if you want your jeans to stay at the same waist
Height that you don't go any higher on the existing crotch seam even though
I'm removing a third of an inch all the way up the inner leg once I reached the crotch
I made sure I aligned my stitched with the
Original one so that it doesn't change the height of these jeans here's where I like to give it a try to make sure everything
Fits okay, if they're okay go ahead and snip off the excess fabric
This is especially
Important if you're doing this for skinny jeans because you just don't want that extra fabric sitting around to seal off the raw Edges I
used a Zig-Zag stitch
I set it to the widest zigzag possible, and then a smaller stitch length
so that it gives me a very fine zigzag all the way along the lake and
here are the
Boyfriend jeans that I took in the waist as you can see there's way less room at the waist and there no law
Great risk of falling off [of] my hips which is great you should be aiming to try to do this super tight?
I mean there has to be a bit of room for your tummy to breathe here are the two darts that we put in yes?
They're there but they're not super noticeable plus. I find this one of the easier ways to get rid of fabric
I don't think I could have removed any more from this because as you can see the pockets are already a bit saggy
But I'm pretty happy with how this turned out slipping into my skinny jeans you can see [that] the leg fits much better now
There's way less spare fabric to pinch and it doesn't look
Anywhere near as baggy as it used to everything fits a lot better
And I'll give you a look at the inner leg it definitely doesn't have the same
faded jean quality that it used to because we tucked away a lot of fabric but over time that's going to come back and that's
The nice thing about taking the fabric out of the inner leg is that it's a part of the gene that's definitely not as noticeable
Hope this quick tutorial was helpful for you if you were looking to downsize a pair of jeans if you haven't subscribed yet click
The subscribe button below so that you don't miss out on any more of my tutorials
I already
Posted a tutorial in the past that shows how to turn flare jeans into skinny jeans and also tutorial on how to hem a pair
Of jeans if you want to check out either of those there is a link in the description for you. Thanks for watching bye