My pants saga

I bought a new pair of jeans online. A really awesome and on sale pair of jeans. They arrived last week and are beautiful.

However, they are made for a person about 7 feet tall.

But I'm not willing to part with them. They otherwise fit amazingly. All of my other jeans don't fit or have holes. I need jeans for the upcoming vacation. They are Michael Kors and I got them on sale — BIG sale.

What to do?

I own a sewing machine, so hemming them myself was an option. I'm sure that I've hemmed things before. My mom was always sewing stuff for Toonces and I when we were kids. And I know she tried to teach us. Plus, I must have learned something in middle school home ec, right?

I pulled up a YouTube tutorial video on how to hem pants. It looked easy enough but I didn't want to chance it.

Then I Googled "hemming" "alterations" and "tailor" and I kept coming up with a place around the corner and up the hill from work.

I figured: How much could it possibly cost to get someone to hem one pair of jeans? Isn't the peace of mind of knowing a professional is doing it worth something?

The decision made, I then wondered what the procedure was for getting pants hemmed. Do you pin them up yourself? Or put them on at the store and have the person pin them?

I didn't know.

I put the pants on with the plan of pinning them myself. But I didn't have any pins. So, I grabbed the packaging tape and taped one leg at the length that I wanted. Then I took the pants off, measured the inseam (or what I think would be the inseam) and put the pants on again just to make sure.

Satisfied I knew what I was doing, I headed off last Thursday morning with my pants.

At the store, there was one lady sitting at a sewing machine. She had a tape measure around her neck, one of those pincushion thingys on her wrist and piles of clothes surrounding her. Those are all good signs, right? I showed her the taped pants and said that I wanted the inseam to be 28 1/2 inches (my measurement at home was 28 inches but I figured a half-inch too long wouldn't hurt). She just nodded, wrote 28 1/2 on a piece of paper and told me to come back in a week.

After I left my pants, I began to panic. What if she hadn't heard me say inseam? Is there such a thing as an outseam? What if I measured wrong? She'd asked me if I wanted to try them on. If this got messed up, I could only blame myself. And I didn't even ask how much it was going to cost.

Oh, god! What have I done?!

Anyway, the pants are scheduled to be picked up tomorrow — Thursday, July 8.

I warned Kayhow that if she gets a call from me and only hears sobs and blubbering, that means the hemming has gone horribly wrong.

After she walked past my desk pretending to be some type of razor-fingered robot, she tried to reassure me that it would be fine but added that if they're too short I can turn them into shorts.

Shorts? Yeah, right ... wouldn't that require more hemming?