How to lengthen outgrown pants – a tutorial

Last week I shared a few sewing projects I wanted to work on, at the top of the list was the Goose’s cow print minky pants.  It’s probably pathetic how much I love these things.

Seriously though, how can you not love them?!

Anyway, this year they were too short.  They would be adorable as capris (and trust me I fully intend to make her some…it’s probable that I have the fabric on hand right now) but the minky material kind of kills that idea for these specific pants.  They fit wonderfully around the waist still and I wanted to make them last longer so I came up a way to do that.

What I decided to do was add a 2nd ruffle to the bottom of the pants, this time using black minky dot fabric.  Here’s a quick(ish) step by step (cell phone photo) tutorial on how I did it.

The first step is to measure the inside of the pant leg, for this pair of pants I measured at the top of the ruffle, I flipped the ruffle up and then laid the leg out flat and measured how long it was and doubled it.

I learned while making the Rainbow Ruffle Dress that when overlapping ruffles I want at least 2 inches of ruffle hanging over the spacer piece.  That meant because my cow print ruffle was cut to 5 inches I needed a black minky dot strip of fabric that was 3″ long x the width of the pant leg.  You don’t want this piece to have any gather to it, it’s just a straight band.

 Once you have your piece cut you’re going to sew the short ends together with the right sides of the fabric together.

Next you need to decide how long you want your ruffle piece to be.  I needed her pants to be a couple inches longer than they were to make them fit for the rest of the season.  I decided to cut my ruffle 5 inches wide again.  This would give me another 2.5-3 inches in length below the cow ruffle.  Once you decide the width you need to decide the length, you’ll want this piece to have some ruffle and I believe how much ruffle depends on how ruffled the layer above it is (if you’re just adding a ruffle to regular pants with no ruffle you can do whatever you’d like).  The cow print on these pants didn’t have a lot of ruffle to start with so I didn’t want to put too much ruffle on the black layer.  I added 3 or 4 inches to the length of the 1st piece to give it a little room for gathering.

Again you’re going to sew the short side together, right sides together.

I find it easiest to hem the bottom before doing any gathering/ruffling so I did that step next.  Since minky is AWESOME and doesn’t fray I just did a quick hem without finishing the edge 1st (sometimes I am rebellious)

 After you’ve got your hem done you’re going to do a long straight stitch along the top of the ruffle (opposite end of your hem) and then pull your bottom thread to create your gather.  In this picture it’s gathered tighter than I needed it to be to fit the pants.

Once you’ve got the 2nd tube gathered so it will fit inside the 1st tube you’re going to want to tie off the ends of your long stitch to keep it from getting wider while you sew and then put the smaller 1st tube around the outside of the gathered/ruffled tube right sides together.  Here pinning will be your friend.  Just go around and pin the 2 edges together to help keep everything in place while you sew them together.  Before you start sewing don’t forget to shorten your stitch length again or you’ll be SAD!

This is what it will look like once they’re sewn together, looking pretty cute right.  At this point my daughters wanted to know if this was a skirt for their American Girl dolls…I’m guessing you could easily do just that!

OK, now you’re going to once again want to find that seam inside the leg of your pants.  The one where you attached your 1st ruffle to the leg of the pants, this is what mine looks like again.

I found it easiest to just attach my new ruffle to that same seam.  I smoothed them out together and then pinned them.  You’ll do this the same way you did when you attached the 2 black pieces.  Take the black ruffle and tube inside out and slide it over the leg of the pants with the cow print ruffle also laying the same direction as the black material.  Again, pin, pin, pin and don’t forget to line up your side seams.  Since I lined them up on the black pieces and there was only 1 seam I put it to the inside of the leg.

Sandwich them all together and get to sewing.

 Here is what it looks like all sewn together with the cow print ruffle up.  Pretty easy right?

And a look at the finished pants with the cow layer up so you can see how it all goes together.

Pretty dang cute right?

Even cuter on my little Monkey.  I’m so happy she’ll get to wear these a while longer and since I used I think less than 1/4 of a yard of material it wasn’t an expensive fix either.

If you have any questions or need any clarification please don’t hesitate to ask.  Have a wonderful day!

~Jenn

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