Black Velvet Trousers (Alterations)

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In my quest to work through my huge stash of fabric and unfinished projects, I encountered this black velvet suit I made back in 2018. Pleased as I was with it at the time, I was well aware that it had quite a few issues, and though I intended to make the all necessary alterations, I never did. Looking at it two years later, I decided that the jacket wasn't worth altering - it was very, very lumpy throughout and would be better loved upcycled into something else - but the trousers were fixable.

(before - the one time I wore it)

(also before - bad photo of protruding belt loops)

The main problem with the trousers was that the waistband was pretty lumpy, and it had huge, bulky belt loops protruding out of it, when it was never going to be worn with a belt. I think the cause of the lumpiness was that when I trimmed down the waistband/trouser waist seam, I cut both layers down to the same extent, and only discovered afterwards that you're meant to layer your seam allowances when you trim them if you don't want a noticeable bump. But, I had spare fabric - this steam velvet is something I can never get enough of, so cutting out a new waistband wasn't much of a problem.

I unpicked the old waistband and ironed the trousers waist seam flat - to press velvet, always iron from the wrong side of the fabric, and preferably place a scrap piece of velvet underneath the section that needs ironing (this cushions the velvet pile and stops it from turning into crushed velvet). Then I cut out a new waistband from my velvet, using the same pattern as last time (Burda 6898) as a guide - I kept the length the same, but I added in an extra 2" to the width. This was because I found the trousers sat a little lower than I like these days, so wanted to add in some extra height where I could. I then cut out and applied some lightweight interfacing of the same measurement to the wrong side of the fabric.

When I originally made the trousers, I'd trimmed the seam allowance at the trouser waist right down to roughly 1/8", which I had to keep in mind when pinning the new waistband (which had 5/8" seam allowance) to this - basically the waistband seam allowance had to overhang the trousers by 1/2 an inch. Velvet is always a pain to prep because it slips around so much, yet never looks like it's going to, so you need a lot of carefully positioned pins to minimise this. Other than that, I sewed the waistband on exactly as the instructions said, which is likely exactly the same as any other trouser pattern.

This was a pretty quick alteration, all-in-all. It's kind of embarrassing it took me 2 years to get round to it, but there is something about alterations that I simply dread. Truth be told, these trousers still aren't perfect - the pockets are quite bulky and show through the outside of the trousers, and there's something up with the fly area as the zipper does show from certain angles, some of the time (careful posing hid that here though). However, they are now perfectly wearable, which was all I was aiming for with this. And as with my blue velvet trousers (made from the same velvet but in, you guessed it, blue), these are super soft and comfy, making them brilliant lounging-about-the-house trousers, and given that I don't leave the house these days, that makes this a mighty successful project in my book!