Pants to shorts - Toddler

We are in the middle of summer with temperatures hitting 100 degrees. Time to wear some shorts.

My daughter has some of these pants that she used to wear before it got too hot. Let's try to convert them to shorts with some basic stitching.This is my first foray into converting pants to shorts. The most important aspect of this refashion is the cut. Make the cut right and half the work is done.

First you take a shorts that fits your toddler well.

Just like this!

Then make the cut making sure you give enough seam allowance to stitch down the hem. I want this new shorts to be 3/4 to an inch longer than my model shorts. So I gave allowance to that as well.

Keep the fabric remnants for your future refashions. You will never know when you will need them!

I like the frilly edgging of this pants!

Next step - turn it inside out and then pin the hem down. Since the fabric doesn't fray, I only turned it down once. Also make sure you measure each leg as you pin it down so the hem is all even.

Stitching the hem down. You can also hand stitch this at this point. In fact I think hand stitching will give it a better finish than the machine stitching. So don't worry if you don't have a sewing machine. There are many, many things you could do with a needle and thread. I chose machine stitching as I didn't have much time and need this completed fast. Since the fabric is stretchy I used a zig-zag stitch.

Once all the stitchery is complete it looks like this. If you use matching thread you can hardly see the stitches :-)

In this case I used the bobbin thread the right color of the fabric while keeping the upper thread white. Another trick if you ant to save your special color threads from running out!

Not bad, eh? I think it looks cute. What do you think?