Bell bottom jeans

After sewing 3 quilts for charity and doing the quilting and binding on another one, I got the itch to make bell bottom jeans from a technique that I saw on The Quilt Show.  In that show, the quilter demonstrated taking an old pair of skinny legged jeans and inserting a quilted piece to make them bell bottomed.  

I had just the old pair in my drawer.  I put on the jeans and placed a pin just below my knee so that I would know how tall to make my insert.  It turned out to be 16" on my pair.  Then, I measured the circumference of the hem on the existing jeans and decided to add 10" to that measurement to give me the amount of "bell" that I was comfortable with.  In the first picture, you can see where I opened up the seam on the outer side of the leg and picked open the seam at the bottom.  You probably don't have to pick out the bottom hem on some jeans, but since these were skinny jeans they hit me at the ankle and I wanted them to be longer.

Using freezer paper, I sketched up a trial pattern, adding a seam allowance 

Of course, I had to use green for the insert.  Someone at the last quilt guild meeting handed me a stack of green fabrics that had been sewn into rectangles.  It was super quick and easy to sew a couple of them together and use them for the base of the inserts.   I quilted the inserts with lightweight Thermore batting and then added stems and flowers using hand embroidery.  (This was my granddaughter's idea to bling them up a bit).

After I did the hand embroidery, I trimmed the inserts then stitched them with a lining and turned them inside out.  I top stitched 1/8" from the edge and stitched the bottom edges together.  

The inserts were placed underneath the openings in the jeans and top stitched close to the edge.  This is the tricky part of this project because even with the free arm of the machine, you have to carefully pull and place the leg to be able to sew the seam. 

I finished off the pants with a binding at the bottom edge. I cut the binding 3" wide and after sewing it onto the front, I turned the edges to the wrong side and stitched in the ditch from the front, just barely catching the binding on the wrong side.  

I'm pretty happy with they way the bell bottom jeans look now, and I hope you like them too!