How to keep your pants from falling down

So a while back I made myself a pair of Strides by Greenstyle Creations. (Which I blogged about here). I used athletic fabric from Fabricland for my waistband. Unfortunately the particular fabric doesn’t have good enough recovery to make a good waistband, which I didn’t realize until I was wearing them for the second time and they kept falling down (several inches).

In case I lost you back there “recovery” in sewing terms, refers to how well a fabric can “snap back” when stretched. Some fabrics are more relaxed than others, they will snap back when there is no resistance (ie in a pile on the floor) but are more than content to be stretched when you are wearing them. Other fabric give more of a compressed feeling when you are wearing them. These fabrics are more useful for waistbands.

In order to fix my mistake, I spent some quality time with my seam ripper and took off the waistband. The clear elastic that I had put in the waistband had broken when I wore the pants for the first time and that fabric just wasn’t up to the challenge of holding my pants up.

I cut out an extra inner waistband piece out of power net (which I had purchased for a previous project from Water Tower Textiles) I basted (a long straight temporary stitch designed to hold things in place before using a more secure stitch) that extra layer into my waistband.

Then I reattached my waistband to my pants.

The result isn’t perfect, but it is significantly better. Aside from not fixing the elastic when I had the waistband off the pants anyway, the main reason I still have to pull them up a bit is because they are a bit tight in the thighs.

For my next pair of Strides, (which I blogged about here.) I graded out in the thighs and added the power mesh to begin with. If I lost you again what I mean by “grading” is I made the thighs a bigger size than the waist. My second pair fit perfectly and my pants don’t even shift at all, even when I’m squatting during my workouts.

I just finished fixing the waistband and a couple pairs of Peg Legs shorts by Patterns for Pirates I made last summer. (I posted about the Peg Legs Pattern here). I took pictures as I went to illustrate my instructions as I didn’t think to take pictures while I was fixing my Strides. The thing I did differently with the shorts I just fixed was since the waistband is a folded waistband (and seven inches wide before folding) is I ran a triple stretch stitch down the middle (where it folds) before I reattached the waistband in order to keep the layers from shifting.

Now I plan to put power net (or power mesh) in all of my waistbands whether the pattern calls for it or not.