A serendipitously satisfying sewing job

Sometimes, things just work out like the happiest kind of magic.

My husband put a pair of sweatpants in the Command Center, which means he wanted them mended somehow.  I looked them over and saw that the cuffs were a bit ripped, as though he'd been stepping on them, but I couldn't see anything else wrong.  Sometimes the mending comes into my Command Center "marked" -- for example, a single sock with a pencil helpfully poking through a hole in the toe makes it pretty obvious what the problem is. In this case, the reason he wanted mending wasn't obvious.

I hunted my guy down and asked what the problem was: he said the elastic was so loose, the pants fell down.  Well, who needs that?  So now I had my mission: could I help keep the sweatpants up around my husband's waist instead of down by his knees.

These pants had the kind of elastic that is stitched right on to the waistband.  It's not at all easy to remove, especially because the pants, the elastic, and the thread are all black.  Even if I could remove it, the only other elastic I had in my stash was white, which would clash if I stitched it in similarly.

Since the pants would be worthless if I didn't fix them, I decided to take a gamble on a hack; even if I ruined them, the only real loss at this point would be my time.  I folded the waistband over, into the pants, and then stitched it down to create a tunnel for the white elastic.  This would make the pants about an inch or two shorter than before, but given the torn cuffs, I figured that shorter pants wasn't a problem and might even be more comfortable.  

Black pants with black stitching
are very hard to photograph well.

I didn't think about this beforehand, but I realized mid-project that this hack also made the hand holes in the pockets about 1 or 2 inches shorter, too, because the waistband folded down across the top of them.  At any rate, I kept stitching.  Then I threaded the elastic through the tunnel, sewed one end down, and safety-pinned the other end so that I could have my husband try the mended pants on and adjust if necessary.

The new waistband, with a safety pin
holding the white elastic in place.

And the verdict was . . . success!  The mended pants didn't fall down.  The new length was actually much nicer.  And my guy, unbidden, told me that the pants were now "cell phone compliant": he said that before, he couldn't carry his cell phone in his pockets because it'd fall out, but now it stays.  (He didn't even know I was fretting that I'd ruined the pockets by making the hole smaller).  

So, this 10-minute gamble of a fix not only saved a pair of pants, it actually improved them in a couple of ways.  Whoop!  Huzzah for the magic of mending that goes right.