How to Take In Pants

Elaine Terrell: Hi, I am Elaine Terrell. I am the owner of Elaine Terrell's Dressmaking and Alterations and today, I am going to show you how to take in the center back seam on a pair of pants. Now this is a just a regular pair of khakis and the center back seam is of course in the back of the pants. It runs from the waistband down to the crotch then you can see here where I have it pinned. This is where we are going to take it in.

Next, I am going to turn the pants inside out and I am going to use these pins as a guide for how to mark them. We are just going to lay this down flat on the ironing board and I am going to use this water soluble marker. I am going to mark right along my pin line, like so. Now I am just going to remove those pins that I used as a guide. Now I am going to press this seam nice and flat like so. Now I am just going to put in a few pins across the points that I am going to be stitching just to hold the fabric together.

Now that it's marked in and are pinned we can stitch it. So I will go to the sewing machine and we will do that. Now I am going to stitch a new center back seam following the dots that I have marked here and I am going to start about two and a half inches above the first dot because I am going to blend the old seam with the new one that I am making and I will be doing the same thing at the end. I will be blending it back into the original seam. I am going to clip my threads and remove the pins, everyone. There are threads also up here where you started and here is the finished seam. You can see how it stitched through all the marking.

So I put this on my little sleeve board which is handy for all kinds of pressing jobs and what I am going to do is press the seam to one side. When you turn the pants right side out you may see that some of your marking still show. So with my marker I remove those markings with a Q-tip. I wet the end of it. So you can see some wet marks on here but here is your finished center back seam. I hope these demonstrations have been useful to you. Thank you very much for watching.