Pants into Jacket Refashion – Part One

A while back I saw an interesting refashion of a pair of pants into a jacket, and I had to give it a try. But… I had no pants I wanted to cut up! Well, not until recently when I noticed that a pair I’d bought in Canada, with a waist I always felt was slightly too low for comfort, had a faint stain in an unfortunate location. The stain wouldn’t budge, so the pants didn’t even make it to the refashion pile – they went straight under the knife (aka, sewing scissors).

I only just remembered to take a ‘before’ photo:

The idea is, you turn the pants upside down and the waistband becomes… the waistband.

I considered the front and back. The instructions I’d read had the front of the pants become the front of the jacket. But I could see that the pockets for the back had potential to become usable pockets, so I decided the back of the pants would be the front of my jacket.

The instructions have you hold the pants up to your front, waistband where you want it, then cut off the legs at your shoulder. I deviated from the formula on the arms after this.

The ‘front’ is cut up along the centre seam and the inner leg seams slashed…

I stitched down the front-now-back pocket inserts so they’d stay flat, then turned the back-now-front pockets down and stitched them to the waistband:

Then I unpicked the centre seam of the new back to the fly and resewed it flat:

Next I used an existing shirt to work out where the armholes and neck shaping should go:

And did the same for the arms:

The refashion I based this on had you cut open the outer leg seam and attach the arms to it, to form a drop shoulder. The cut edge of the legs were sewn together to form the shoulder, then you cut a v-shaped neck and hemmed it.

I’m not a big fan of drop shoulders, but I could have lived with them for this project. But a shaped armhole isn’t that hard to do. I liked the v-neck less, and hemming would have made the front of the jacket narrower then the back. I decided on a facing, and that led to other ideas… but I’ll leave them to the next post.

This whole project was done in short snatches of time. An hour here and and half an hour there, and the final bit done around a cranky back and then a head cold. The whole thing would make for a very long post, so I’m dividing it into two.