Day 4: Altered Pants

Our youngest son is an Angry Birds fanatic. He was first exposed to the game last December when I bought my iPod.  It was instant love.  He has now cleared all the levels in all the Angry Birds games that exist, owns nearly all of the plush toys, several shirts, 2 keychains, a board game, some figurines, 2 posters, tatoos, a magnet set...I'm sure I'm forgetting something here.  He used polymer clay to sculpt a set of Angry Birds and pigs.  He duplicated levels with Lego blocks and knocked the Lego pigs down with Lego birds shot from a popsicle stick slingshot he glued himself.  Nearly every piece of his artwork in pre-k contained some rendition of an Angry Birds level.  He once sat and wrote a 10-page book with drawings of levels and descriptions of their difficulty that he dictated to me to write down for him.  Yup.  He is {just a little} obsessed.

Enter the pants:

While Christmas shopping this year he spotted this pair of super fluffy Angry Birds pajama bottoms in the men's department of Target.  They were a large.  In men's.  He of course insisted that I look for his size in the kids' section; complaining about the injustice of it all: "But grown-ups don't even like Angry Birds, Mom.  It's for kids.  Why don't they make them in kids' sizes?"  There are some questions in life that have no logical explanation.  

My little crafty wheel started turning in my brain wondering if I could alter these to fit him, and my sewing skill brain tried to put the brakes on the whole project and say, "Nah, you could never do that." And then I looked at my little guy rubbing his face into the pants to feel their softness and that's all it took.  I tossed them into the cart when he wasn't looking.

Altering them wasn't really all that hard, even for someone like me with minimum sewing skills.

The Task:

Turn these men's large pants (left) into a child's size small (right):

Yikes!  That's a really big difference.

The First Step:

I started with the elastic by snipping into the pocket the elastic is threaded through. I snipped right around being careful not to cut the elastic so I could reuse it.

Easy, right?  Until I realized these were really well-made pants and the elastic was sewn into the pants on the top.  And the bottom.  Grrr for well-made pants that I am using to tear apart.

So me and my little seam ripper got to be really good friends, and I tore out the stitching in both sides of the elastic.

 

Step Two:

Then I simply laid a pair of his pajama pants onto the Angry Birds ones to figure out where to cut.  I lined up the inseam since I wasn't going to alter that and sliced leaving about 2 1/2" for the hem and 1/2" for the side seam. I folded the hem up twice and sewed it with a zigzag stitch to catch it and then a straight stitch 1/4" below that.

Step Three:

To figure out how much elastic I would need, I just measured against his pants and snipped leaving just enough to join the ends (about 1/2" total).

And this is all I had completed that day he was at school.  I stuffed the pants into my closet for 3 weeks procrastinating the waist band.  Sometimes I make things out to be so much harder in my head than they really are.  But when I did return to this project, I had completely forgotten about taking step-by-step photos. {whoops!} So on we go, photoless.

Step Four:

The waist band.  I cut off just the bit of waist that I had hacked up to get the elastic out and folded down about 1/2" pinned and sewed.  I then folded down about an inch and stitched that to create a pocket leaving a space through which to thread the elastic.  I attached a safety pin to the elastic (a trick I learned from my mom as a little girl--see Mom, I did pay attention to what you taught me about sewing!).  Once it's all threaded, unclip the safety pin, stitch the two ends of elastic together and sew the opening closed.

That's all there was to it!  I will definitely do something like this again--beware humongous men-sized pants covered in child-loved characters!

The best part--he LOVED his new super fluffy and cuddly Angry Birds pants.

{photo coming soon}

what kind of a {crafty person} mother am I, not taking a picture of my {amazing seamstress skillz} son in his new favorite jammie bottoms?