Linda Pants Alterations: Adding A Pocket Extension With Tutorial

I recently made the Linda Pants by Mood Fabrics (MDF 294). One of the design features that made me decide to sew them was the pockets. The best pic of them is on theMood site. At the time that I made these, I concentrated mainly on the fitting alterations. I didn’t stop to think about whether or not the pockets were big enough for my needs. They’re unusual pockets with a different construction, so I was mostly focused on that while sewing them.

After I finished the pants, I put my phone into the pocket. It was at that point that I first noticed that the pocket was shallow, meaning my phone just fit. At the time I thought I could probably live with it that way, so long as it holds my phone securely. It was fine until one day I was sitting down and the phone slid out from the pocket and hit the floor. As a seamstress, the very first thing that came to my mind when this happened was: “I’ve gotta fix that pocket!”

And that’s just what I did. Here’s how:

Tutorial

This is a before pic of the pocket:

I unpicked the stitches all the way to the pants side seam:

Ripping the pocket seam this far did open the side seam of the pants and had to be stitched back up later.

Now that the bottom stitches were gone, the pocket could be altered.

I needed to increase the depth of the pocket, so I made a template of the pocket bottom:

I then cut out my extension piece from the fabric:

I cut the piece on a fold, because that’s how the pocket itself was made. Remember I said that they have a unique construction? They’re folded, so my extension has to be too.

Here’s my cut piece:

I then zig-zagged the top so that it won’t fray:

Now it was time to pin the extension to the pocket. I began by pinning half of the extension to the under side of the pocket:

I folded the seam allowance over on the right side and pinned it (above). I then stitched that into place:

Next I folded the extension over and pinned it to the top half of the pocket:

I stitched that together, then stitched the extension sides and bottom together:

Another view of the finished work:

And….done! Now it’s a deeper pocket. Not too difficult of a fix, and makes a world of difference in functionality.

I hope this helped show that many problems of clothing fit and function can be improved with a simple alteration fix. Of course if I make these again I’ll just extend the pockets before cutting, but for these that I made, this worked well.

Thanks for reading 🙂