re-fashioning a wide pant leg to a slimmer leg (shown on a jumpsuit)

It took me a reeeeaaaaaaalllllyyyy long time to warm up to jumpsuits. Well... that's not entirely true. I have always loved the look of military or work-wear type jumpers:

Rosie the Riveter anyone????

 but somehow can't seem to pull those off without looking like Mario or Luigi the plumber cousins (yes the Nintendo ones)...I basically was disgusted by the more feminine ones I kept seeing pop up, but then I saw these one day browsing some nerdy fashion history website:

and I started to change my mind. You see, the issue I think, is that all the modern jumpsuits I was seeing didn't have these amazing vintage silhouettes. The modern versions tend to have wide legs, which are actually also slowly growing on me, but unfortunately I don't feel like my body type is best complimented by those shapes.

SO. when I stumbled across a very inexpensive Target jumpsuit on a clearance rack in my size, with a floral print, colors , and buttons, I just couldn't pass it up. 

I mean...look at it!!!

I acknowledge my vertical challenged-ness, which once again, doesn't look all that great with this silhouette, and my little mind went to work thinking of how I could make my treasure even better, and look more like a vintage jumpsuit. 

I quickly realized it was all in the legs...this jumpsuit already had the upper silhouette of the 40s-50s ones I loved so much in the bodice, and I didn't want to mess with the buttons either. So I set out to work. 

At first I thought maybe I could just put elastic in the hems of the legs to make it tighter around my calves...I ended up just looking like an extra from Aladdin (yikes...) so I removed the elastics and went back to the drawing board.

After some serious racking in my brain I remember I had once taken in a pair of skinny jeans when I was in college, and vaguely remembered the process. I figured that really might work for the lower portion of this jumpsuit. After some trial and error, I got to work on taking in the legs of my jumpsuit. Below is a sketch of the process with numbered directions, keeping in mind, I am by no means an expert seamstress...this is perfect for the lazy and the beginner sewer :D

1. turn your pantalons of choice inside out

2. tear out the hems from the bottom

3. wear the pantalons inside out, and play around with the fabric to figure out how tight you want it, you definitely don't want to make it skin tight depending on your fabric content because your foot is still going to need to fit through the hem opening...once you have a good idea of what you want your new leg to look like, start pinning. Make sure you are pinching excess fabric and pinning on the INNER seam. Stop pinning when you reach the crotch seam. Don't mess with that...unless you want to do extra work later HA

4. remove the pants and get yourself some chalk in a color you can easily see against the fabric

5. chalk along the interior of the pins (between the pins and the original inner seam)

6. sew along your chalk line, removing pins as you go

7. try on your pants right side out, to see what the fit is like, you can go back and pick out seams and re-sew if stuff looks wonky at this point, but once you feel happy with the new fit...

8. turn the pants back to their inside out form, and cut off all the excess fabric on that original inner seam...unless you like the bunched up look and feel of all that extra fabric, then by all means skip this step :p

9. While in their inside out state, re-hem the pants. I'm ultra lazy and on my lightweight cotton jumpsuit saw no reason to actually sew the hem so I used heat n' bond hem tape and an iron lolz...but obviously you can sew the hems back on as well.

10. Enjoy your newly tapered pants!

PS: I used the excess fabric to make a long ribbon type thing...which could be worn as a waist tie or headband! I felt pretty clever

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! How do you feel about wide leg jumpsuits? Do you feel like you might try to taper some pants with this method? Let me know in the comments :)

Merci