Shopping My Own Closet

Well hey there! It's been a while - 6 months, to be exact. I don't have any other excuse other than this: life. So... let's get on with it!

I have a full rack of thrift store finds, ready for refashioning at any given moment. In true Colette fashion, I had no idea what to do with any of them. So I turned to my own closet.

There, I found a pair of dress pants that I've had for a good 5 years. Of those 5, I have definitely not worn them for the last 2. Mainly because they've always been baggy, long and generally ridiculous looking. Naturally, I just hoarded them away instead of fixing them.

Enter: baggy, big, wide legged dress pants -

I've seen a few Pinterest pins and a few YouTube videos on how to fix pant legs of dress pants, so I had a general idea on how to do it. Although, I should mention that I did not pull up any said instructions, and I just went for it from memory. Clearly, some of this is just completely made up.

First, I put on my pants inside out. This is super weird if you don't have a habit of doing this outside of the early morning hours when you just toss on pants with zero give-a-damn because you are not yet fully awake. (We've all been there.) Don't panic that this has potential to be inappropriate - I kept my leggings on underneath the pants because it's not that kind of blog.

Next step is to contort yourself so you keep your pant seams straight, but are still able to pin the seams to thin out the wide legs. I started just above the knee and slowly tapered it in towards my ankle.

It wasn't pretty. 

Next, I took the pants off. Once I cleaned off all the blood from the crazy amount of pin pricks this caused, I put them on the table with the legs hanging off so they had a natural "fall". This is probably unnecessary but made me feel like I was doing something beneficial. 

I then straightened up my pins so it was a gentle taper that made sense instead of a line of a drunken seamstress. For the record, I attained the drunken seamstress line without actually consuming alcohol. (Shocked? Me too! Wine probably would have helped, in all honesty.)

Once I sewed my line, I quickly cut off the excess so I couldn't change my mind. My new mantra at this point was "I haven't worn these in years, I haven't worn these in years..."

Now, I thought I took pictures of this, but apparently I failed at uploading them. So the next step was to shorten them so they didn't go past my toes for a few inches. I went ahead and cut off the entire bottom cuff, then created a half inch seam and sewed it up.

Final result? Not nearly as bad as I was thinking! (How's that for a clear show of positivity!)

They still look pretty rough with just bare feet - meaning flats may look a bit goofy. However, slap on a pair of shoes and VOILA - not so funny looking legs!

I do have quite a few other dress pants that have the wide leg (what exactly was I thinking?!) With my short stature, I definitely can't pull it off these days. Never could, really... So I may continue doing this with my other wide-legged pants. Nothing better than waking up your old wardrobe!

Until next time - see you later!