Sewing : Win Some, Lose Some - 2 August 2024

The update for this project is not 100% positive. I love a challenge but so far this jeans upsizing project hasn’t gone according to plan.

I added a substantially wide strip to the sides of the jeans to make them bigger. The photo below shows you a view of the sewing process:

_{Following the existing seam lines.}

When I sewed the strips to the legs of the jeans it was just straight stitching aiming to sew right in the original sewing line. The material is black and much darker than the photo above shows; this process was not too hard but for some unknown reason the machine did not cooperate : skipping stitches, cutting the thread, making weird noises. I kept asking myself : is it the tension, a worn needle, a slightly stretchy denim ? I just kept going and went over some seams twice or three times to make up for this limitation.

As an aside, this is the machine I’m using :

Although it clearly says Heavy Duty, it struggled. The machine has generally worked just fine but perhaps it was the tight weave of the denim. I appreciate that trying to sew the waistband made up of three or four layers of the thickness of a normal pair of denim jeans would be tough, but I didn't think that just to layers would cause such aggravation.

For the waistband I had to find similar colour material. After a lot of searching I found this pair of old ‘paper bag trousers’. The fabric looks like denim but it’s thinner. I used part of the belt that you see below as it was precisely 4 cm in width just like the waistband of the jeans.

The first step was to take off the very ‘eye-catching’ white stitching. This wasn’t hard at all and it saved me from making a waistband from scratch. What was hard was to try and then put elastic inside the waistband.
The strip down the legs I added was 23cm wide so in order to ‘make the waist fit’ to my friend’s current waistline I needed to fit elastic strips, sew at each end and then sew to the waistband. This process helped to ‘singe at the waist’ by gathering the extra material. Only problem was that as it turned out sadly, it did not gather enough.

_{Side view showing the strip added with the partially gathered waistband.}

My friend still thinks we can fix the jeans and is happy with the look. I now have to envisage where else to put elastic to make the waist smaller - perhaps the straight strips should have decreased in width as they approached the waist line. I’m not sure but will persevere till the end.

Thank you for reading !