hello my name is Nev and and today I'm going to show you how to take any waistband on a pair of pants when I worked as a tailor this was the primary method we used for waistband alterations and it works best on dress pants and slacks and does not work at all for jeans or anything with top stitching or details or yoke in the back to illustrate for it you pinch the back seen mark it off sew it up press it you're done it's really really easy anyone can you have any level of skill but you do need a sewing machine so if you'd like to learn alter your own clothing please keep watching this technique only really works on slacks or dress pants where there's no top stitching or embellishment along the center back seam in contrast to for example a pair of jeans there is top stitching and if you wanted to take it in and that seam you'd have to pick all of that out these jeans also have a belt loop Center back which you'd also have to pick out these pants are great because they don't have any belt loops so I don't have to worry about that if your pants do have belt loops a lot of the time dress pants men's pants are often made to be altered so they will offset the back belt loops from the center center back seam and you'll have like - - belt loops a little bit apart instead of just one in the center back but my pants that I'm doing today are great because there is no top stitching no belt loops I've just got to kind of pinch this and sew it and we're done the first thing you need to do is put on your pants and then you need to kind of pinch the back seam to feel how much you're going to take in and then you can either pin it mark it with tailors chalk or just kind of gauge by feel how much you're going to take in but I'm just going to pin it so once you've got it pinned you want to open it up and on the inside of the waistband you want to take tailors chalk and just kind of transfer this measurement onto the inside so I'm just going to rub a bunch of times here and then I can take this out and then I can see I'm taking my pants in this much now these have a label so I'm going to have to take the the tag out so I just got a seam ripper I'm going to remove this really quickly so I've removed the tags because they were just kind of in the way and I've got my two seams marked here I just realized on this I've got these weird pocket things going so I'm close enough to it that I'm actually going to aim to be just outside of the pocket things so my line is going to move over like quarter of an inch or something but whatever okay so this is what I have now this waistband is a solid piece here at sunup this is a solid piece I'm not going to worry about that for now I'm just going to take apart the center back seam from the top down about six inches so I'm using a seam ripper for this this is a more high-end one but you can get a seam ripper for like fifty cents or something like less than a dollar but yeah I'm just going to rip out this seam about six inches so this is about what it looks like now and you can kind of see better so I've ripped the scene down opened it up about what about six seven inches and I've left the waistband completely intact now there is a center back seam right here but there isn't on the inside so I'm just going to ignore this there are some pairs of pants that it's made so that you can very easily pull out the entire seam and take it in or take it out this one is kind of like not really so I'm just going to cut it and ordinarily that would bleed like a weird phrase but it's fine because this will be folded in and there's going to be enough of it to kind of absorb the the red yet so I'm just going to cut straight through like that and it's okay if if you nicked a bit of the pant fabric as opposed to the waistband fabric so this is what you have in the back you've got two seam that's open there should be some like stray threads from where you were pulling it out you can kind of clean those up but you should still have like more or less the the way it was finished in the factory the third edge should still be there you shouldn't cut this part it's a little bit nicked it's fine it's not a big deal but yeah basically you have this so what you're going to need to do now is turn the entire garment inside out and then you can pin it so what I'm doing is I'm just lining up the edges and I'm pinning it so the seam I just ripped out is now pinned back together but I'm going to draw in a new seam line so what I'm going to do is this is the mark right here from where I wanted to take it in there is this pocket here which is a bit weird so I'm just going to move it to this slightly the other side of the pocket and then what I'm going to do is I just need to kind of angle this in over the next six inches or so so that's about where I'm going to so I'm avoiding this pocket I can feel on the other side it's not going to hit the pocket this seam right here is a little bit twisted and you are going to need to kind of pick it out of it but I can do that afterwards what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get my sewing machine and I'm going to sew along here so I'm just going to sew up this seen that I've marked all the way until the end where I had no longer ripped the original seam so it's actually going to end about there so from there to there you can hand sew this this is one of the things there's only one straight seam however your stitches will need to be really small and really straight and really strong for this to be a functional garment that's hand-sewn and if you're that good at hands on I just official on a sewing machine - you might as well machine show it so yes just going to fill this up okay so that's the same I'll just spell what I'm going to do now is I'm going to try it on to make sure it kind of fits right and there's no like weird at the end of the scheme there's no like weird puckering out or anything like that so yeah but I'm more or less than at this point so if you're not happy with how this has turned out maybe there's like a weird peak where you're seeing missed the pant seam or it's kind of puffy or it's too tight you just go back to step one rip it out start again fairly straightforward although it's kind of annoying to have to pull out that seam if you're happy you just have to clean it up kind of clean up any bits of fluff that are left and if at the top you have any bits of like this is folded over into here so that when I press and it's going to be folded over twice you need to clean that up just you know use a seam ripper and kind of clean this up so I've picked out some of this scene but I can see it's got some like ready bits from where I cut it hopefully your pants don't have this you should just have a straight clean cut but my new so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to trim this up and I'm not going to go very far into this where the the original search seam was I'm going to make that as short as possible but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to exact this at the end so I'm just going to trim off any extra like bulk here and I'm going to pick out any seams that are folded over or causing problems but for the most part I'm just going to leave it like like this and then I'm going to like this exact this so yeah so I'm pretty much done now I just need to press this flat and then the final absolute last thing you need to do is just kind of sew this part down so it doesn't like flip over the wrong way and make like a weird bundle in the back or whatever so there's two ways you can do it you can just sew some basting stitches by hand along each side or you can sew a seam along the top so make sure your thread matches for this so I'm just going to pretend try to you then black and ideally actually your thread will match for the whole thing but I'm lazy plus I wanted you to see it so yes I'm just going to sew a stitch just kind of along the top of the waistband so hold this down and that's about it you're done so this is the finished waistband as you can see there is no weird gap they're not pulling down and you need muffin tops they just you know fit properly and the pair of pants went from being kind of like sloppy and unwearable looking to you know looking like a normal pair of like appropriate pants this is a really easy alteration to do and it's worthwhile learning if you have a large hips if you're quite a lot if you're too powerlifting if you have a big side if you carry your weight down low it's a great thing to learn because they can take a unwearable pair of pants and turn it into a wearable pair of pants especially if you're a tricky size the only real consideration you do kind of have to have a sewing machine in theory you can do it without I don't really recommend it but the great thing is you don't have to have a lot a lot of skill to this so even if you're not so or but know someone who has a sewing machine you can do this so yeah that's basically it yes altering a pair of pants try it out it's a great way to save money on this alteration I will usually run you about twenty-five to fifty dollars depending on where you live and like it's ten minutes of work so really like why would you why would you pay 30 bucks when you can do this really really easily one of the other things you need to consider is if you have a really really extreme difference between your waist and your hips there's a finite amount of fabric you can take out of the Center vaccine before the pocket starts like looking weird so if you maximum you can take out as maybe like two inches on each side of the see maybe like an inch and a half so it's three to four inches total is what you can take it in in the back Steen once you run out of that you move to the side seen that interview in the back you could do two alterations in each side or if you've got a really really extreme your 14 would do it in all three places you do the back seam and both sides jeans yeah so let me know what you think let me know other alterations you'd like to learn or other sewing tutorials but that's about it thank you for watching