Gym Pants to Joggers Refashion Tutorial

I have a good thrift store refashion idea for you today! I found some Adidas gym pants at my Goodwill a couple weeks ago. What I love about Goodwill is that all the pants are one price, regardless of the brand! So I think I paid $5 for them. They were in great shape and fit me pretty well, although they were long, so I think they’re actually mens pants. I bought them with a plan to alter them and into joggers and it worked out exactly as well as I’d hoped! Read on to find out how I upcycled these fleece lined Adidas gym pants into a pair of joggers.

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I’m a big fan of the jogger style of pants. I’ve altered some pants in a similar way before, so I knew it wouldn’t be too hard.

First, I cut off the extra length. I like my joggers to be more of a 7/8 length rather than full length, so I cut accordingly, keeping an extra 2” for the elastic casing.

The next step is to taper the leg to be more of a slim fit. This step just takes a ton of basting and trying on, basting and trying on. You might start by putting the pants on inside out and pinning the leg. On a different pair of pants, you could taper both the outer and inner leg seams, but in my case, I could only alter the inseam, since the Adidas stripes were on the side seams. Be sure and get the fit of the leg just how you want it! It’s worth the extra time!

This photo gives you an idea of how much of the leg I took in. You can see that I tapered the seam up to the crotch line, so I didn’t shorten the crotch at all. And taking too much from the inner thigh can also affect the fit of the butt, so like I said, lots of tweaking and trying on!

After I had the legs shaped just right and neatly sewn and trimmed up, all I had to do was to turn up the casing for the elastic. I had 1.5” elastic on hand, so I turned up the casing 2'“. I stitched it 1/4” from the raw edge, leaving an opening for the elastic. I cut the elastic bigger than I needed, then tried the pants on to adjust it to just the perfect size. Overlap the end and zig zag them together, then finish sewing the casing to close the hole.

To give the cuffs a professional looking finish, I then sewed two more rows of stitching through the elastic, one at 1/2” from the hem, then another 1/2” from that stitching.

These jogger pants turned out so cute and comfy! This is definitely an idea I’ll keep in mind when I go thrifting in the future, (which let’s face it, is all the time, ha!)

Cheers!

Nikki