Tutorial: Tapering Pants

 

Remember these pants from my last post? Yep those are the ones I altered so they were no longer dragging the floor well now I have another problem with them....I don't like FLARES!!! So whats a girl to do?? TAPER!! I'm going to try my first tutorial so here we go.

 

What you will need:

Ruler/Measuring Tape

Pins

White Pencil

Sewing Machine

I started off by putting the pants on inside out and pinning them where I would like the tapering to start. My mark started just about at the knee. Then take off the pants, put them on a flat surface and make sure the pant leg is not bunching up.

 I put a pin at the top of where the taper starts and at the bottom of the pant leg at the point you want to take it in (I measured 2 inches in).  Then used a tape measure to make a white line and pinned along the line. I sewed a straight stitch along the white line. Make sure to put the pants on right side out to see if you like it.

Here is after the first leg:

I liked it so I moved on to the next leg. I put the legs next to each other and matched them up on the exact same spots. Repeat the steps again and after trying them on to make sure I liked them, I suggest cutting the excess material (only do this if you are happy with the pants).

And the final result:

I am very happy with them and I hope you like my tutorial!!

Altering Pants!!

I need to update this blog more!! I have been busy, in my defense, I do have more than this blog post that I need to put up but I want to spread them out a little. Two weekends ago the hubby and I went to KC, KS for Valentine's Day/His 25th Birthday. We stayed in a hotel, went out to eat, and did some shopping. The trip was very fun and relaxing.

On the way back we stopped in Lansing to eat lunch and they happened to have a huge goodwill. I am a sucker for discount clothing and am so ready for garage sale season. We went in there and walked out with a Lucky Brand pair of jeans for him at $6.99.  Also a blue t-shirt for $1.75, and khaki pants at $3.99 for me.

Now I would like to point out that I am 5'1 and finding pants/jeans are extremely hard!! I needed another pair of khaki's for work and they had my size but not my length..well thanks to the wonderful community of Pinterest I remembered that I had found an article on how to hem jeans from Make It and Love It (here is a direct link to the post).  So I thought why not the pants are $3.99 and no one at work is going to care if they are not perfect.

Well tonight I decided to hem the pants and they actually look pretty good! I took some pictures so you can see how it looks now.

Here is after one leg was done (I forgot to take a before pic)

And here is the finished product

I admit I am not a big fan of the more flared leg but I think these turned out pretty good for my first try!!
Well that is all for now next blog I plan to show you my adorable baby sweatpants!

Diaper Cakes

I was looking around on one of my several craft websites and noticed some tutorials on how to make diaper cakes.  Back in February I was helping with my cousins baby shower for her first child. My main task was to make a diaper cake as requested by the new mommy. My favorite part about trying out something new is looking up ideas online and putting my own twist to it. I never did find any good tutorials but I used pictures to figure out what I would do. My hubby ended up helping me out a lot since he is good at the construction part of the project.  The diaper cake was a huge success everyone, including my cousin loved it.
Here it is!

 As you can tell she was having a girl, and she was very specific on not using too many pastels. This diaper cake includes hidden teething toys, baby lotion and is sitting on a pizza/cake pan for the mommy gift. I constructed it from cloth diapers (only because that is what she uses), a package of bodysuits, ribbon, rubberbands, and colorful bath cloths. Over at Craft Envy here is a link to a great diaper cake tutorial, this is very similar to my design except mine is much smaller due to a small budget.

Well when I was looking around at sites, as mentioned earlier, I noticed a very different idea from the traditional diaper cake that is more popular then I realized.  A diaper bassinet is what its called and it looks something like this

The website I got this picture from has a tutorial on how to make one of these and it looks pretty simple. So head on over to Cute As a Fox and check out the diaper bassinet tutorial. If anyone decides to make it let me know how easy/hard this is. Well that's all for today, just wanted to wish you a late Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!