Refashioning Pants into Maternity Shorts Part I

I seem to have reached a wardrobe crisis. I need summer maternity clothing to wear.

The past few days, I have been obsessively making maternity clothing for myself. I was given a box of maternity things and most are too big and too short for me. So I'm refashioning some of the items into things I can wear this summer.

For example, I attacked these pants:

And turned them into these:

They were several sizes too large (even being 27 weeks pregnant...) so I couldn't just cut them off and add a stretchy waist. What I did was trace a pair of my shorts that do fit and make a pattern. Then I completely dismantled the pants and used the pattern from my own shorts to cut out the new shorts, which is the part of the tutorial I'm going to show today. I'll show the sewing directions tomorrow.

Turn the pants inside out so you can see all the seams. The goal is to rip out the crotch seams and inseam, but not the outseam (if that's a technical term!) By 'outseam', I mean the seam running down the outside of the pant leg.

Rip out the seams at the crotch:

You'll also need to rip out the zipper. (Save it--I have some other projects in mind to try repurposing the zippers I've harvested from several pairs of pants.)

You may also have to remove the waistband binding. It will depend on your pattern and how high up you want the rise of your shorts to go.

Here is my pattern all laid out on the pants. Note that the front and back pieces should be different. The back rise is slightly higher than the front and the crotch portions are different. The goal is to lay out the pattern on top of the pants so that the old 'outseam' is now the pair of short's new outseam. You'll want to lay out the back pattern piece on the back of the pants so you can reuse the pockets and vice versa with the front pattern piece.

When cutting, be sure to add a seam allowance if you didn't add one when making the pattern of your shorts.

After you use the pattern to cut out one set of front and back pieces, lay the cut piece over the remaining pant leg. Use it as the pattern.

Measure the inseam you want your shorts to have, add 2" for hemming, and cut off the bottom part of the pant legs. Save them, I have another project in mind!

Tomorrow, I'll show you how to sew the shorts and add a stretchy waistband. I had too many pictures to show in one post!