DIY Anthro pants

Happy 2012 friends!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and had fun ringing in the new year.  Aside from my resolution to be more awesome, one of my resolutions is to spend less money on clothes.  I love to shop and this is going to be rather difficult for me.  However, this will be an excellent chance to dig through all my current clothes and re-fashion them into something newly fabulous.

I saw these pants while shopping at Anthropologie the other day and I'm officially in love with them.  Joe's Cavalier Ponte in turquoise. Turquoise is my favorite color so these are perfect or me!

Since they are a little out of my price range,  I decided to try to make my own.  I have an old pair of khaki pants that have been laying around my closet for about 5 years.  I hate khakis, I haven't worn them since I worked for a retail company (which shall remain nameless) that forced me to wear them every day.  Check out these beauties.

Khaki is so boring! 

DIY Anthro pants

Supplies:

Old pants in decent condition
Fabric dye in your color of choice
Fabric color remover
White vinegar (optional, to set the dye)
Pencil
Skinny jeans to use as a guide
Sewing machine
Scissors
Iron
Coordinating thread

These pants are wide legged and ugly.  My first task was to make them a lovely shade of turquoise.  Since these were already a light brown color, I figured I should try to lighten them even more using RIT Color Remover in my washing machine, I followed the directions on the package (basically I filled my washer with hot water and the dye packet, then dropped the pre-rinsed pants in.) Honestly, I don't think this did much, but, if you have darker pants than these it might help.

Since I wanted them to be a deep turquoise, I used an entire bottle of RIT Liquid Dye in Teal.  This might seem like a lot of dye for one pair of pants but I really wanted them to be the perfect shade of teal.  I like RIT dye because their liquid dyes are really easy to use.  Follow the package directions for using them with your washing machine.  Once the pants were dyed, I ran them again on a short cycle with about half a cup of white vinegar to set the dye.  Then I simply ran them through the dryer. 

I love the shade these turned out to be!

Since these pants had such wide legs and the ones I was copying were skinny jeans, I needed to take them in on the sides.  The easiest way to figure out what width I wanted was to take my favorite pair of skinny jeans and use them as a guide.  I simply turned my new pants inside out and laid them flat, and put the jeans on top, centering the zippers and crotch area to make sure they matched up.

Make sure both pairs of pants are perfectly flat

I then took a pencil and traced the edge of the jeans onto the wrong side of the dyed pants.  Make sure you end on a seam or your sewing will look funny!  Then, I stitched a straight line along the pencil marks from the bottom to the top.  Make sure you fan the line out to the original seams towards the top or you'll get some funny bunching going on ( I made this mistake and ripped my stitches out.) Next, turn the pants right side out again and try them on to make sure they look ok.  If they look funny, rip the stitches out very carefully with a seam ripper or some manicure scissors and start again.

If you like the way they look, turn them inside out again and trim the seams to about 1/4".  Using an iron set for the type of fabric the pants are made from, iron the seams open.

Once you've trimmed all your hanging threads you're ready to show your pants to the world. 

I'm not very good at taking photos

So, these aren't perfect, but, who wants perfect?  For less than $10 I got a new pair of pants in my favorite color.  Score!