I didn't actually sew these jeans from scratch. I feel obliged to tell you that. One pair is from Banana Republic, and the other pair is from Express. What I did was make basically unwearable items into super cute, perfectly fitting jeans. Sadly, I don't have before pictures, but they looked kind of like this:
And now, they look like this:
And this:
No more gape! One pair of perfectly hemmed short jeans for flats and long jeans for heels! Yay! So how did I work this miracle, you ask? You would. ;) I found a tutorial through sewing.craftgossip.com that shows you how. Basically, you rip out the waistband seams, cut out however much you need to in the center of the waistband, put a couple of darts in above the pockets (like below),
...then you stitch the whole thing together again, and you end up with this:
I took two inches out of each waistband and two more inches off the hem of my "skinny" jeans (the ones I'm wearing with gray flats...those are about as skinny as it's going to get around here). I hand-stitched the topstitching, because I wasn't super confident about my sewing-two-perfectly-straight-parallel-lines skills with the machine, but the darts, the center seam, and the hem were done by machine.
These are the first pairs of jeans I've ever had that fit properly, and I'm super excited about it. I couldn't manage to get the back beltloops back on prettily, so I just tossed them both, and I don't really care, because my shirts always cover the waistbands of my jeans anyway.
Just skating in with a February post. I hope you all had a wonderful short month and are looking forward to March and maybe some spring weather (or fall, for those of you in the southern hemisphere)!
