I have an old pair of capri jeans that are my favorite.  They are just so comfortable and fit where they are supposed to fit.  However, I ended up with a hole in one of the knees.  I was originally going to buy a patch for it but I just never got around to it and the hole in my knee became bigger and bigger and bigger.  It finally got to the point where I thought that I better not wear them anymore.

While looking through my Pinterest Sewing board for a bag pattern that I had pinned, I came across a pin for adding cuffs to jeans.  Perfect timing!  The tutorial can be found at Hopeful Threads and was for full lenth jeans but I figured that I might as well try it out on my jean capris.  I couldn’t wear them anymore so I had nothing to lose.

I laid my capris out on my cutting table and made sure the legs were even and I used my rotary cutter to cut the jeans just below the hole in the knee.  I was being very careful because, since they were already capris, I didn’t want them to be too short.

 Once I cut my capris I then cut my fabric.  The fabric piece that I used was 8″x16.5″.  The original tutorial suggested 8″ so that when you fold the length in half you still have 4″ of your pattern showing.  It just depends on how wide you want your cuff to be.  I arrived at the 16.5″ number by measuring the width of my jeans and multiplying by 2 and adding 1/2″ for the seam allowance.  The width of my leg on my capris was 8″ which I muliplied by 2 and added 1/2″ = 16.5″.  You then need to cut two pieces of fabric that fit your measurements.

I folded the cuffs lengthwise, wrong sides together.  I chose to press the fold so that it was nice and crisp.

I kept the fabric folded as pictured above and sewed each piece into a tube by sewing the short ends together.

I then slipped one tube/cuff over each leg of my capries with the raw edges together and right sides together.  Since both sides of the cuff are using the right side of the fabric just be sure that your side seam on the cuff is on the outside facing you.  I didn’t do this and then when I turned my cuff the seam of the cuff ended up being on the outside.  I had to rip the entire cuff off of each leg and re-sew them back on.  Once I had the cuffs slipped onto the capris I pinned them in place.  I put the seam of the cuff against the inseam of the capris.  Once pinned I sewed them in place using a 1/4″ seam.

When I had finished sewing the cuffs in place I turned the cuff down so that the seam joining the cuffs and capris was now inside the capris.

I turned the capris inside out and pressed the seam up towards the capris.  I then turned the capris back to right side out and topped stitched all the way around on the capri fabric making sure that I caught the seam in there too.

That was it!  I couldn’t believe how easy it all went together.  It took me a bit longer than it should have since I sewed the wrong side of the cuff to the capris.  If it wasn’t for having to rip out that mistake I would have had the whole project done in about 30 minutes.  I may need to take a drive out to the thrift store to find some old jeans that I can turn into capris.  This was a great project!

Happy Sewing!!