A Little Velcro Kindness...

Received a call from a friend early last week. It seems her oldest son was getting married and he wanted his brother to be his best man. That is a good thing. However, the younger brother was in a very bad wreck a year ago. He has had to have multiple surgeries to try and get his leg mended properly. This last surgery required one of those awful looking cages around his leg with the wires going from the outside of the cage into your leg at various points. This meant he has been wear shorts all summer as that is the only thing he could get that cage into. He may have worn sweat pants a time or two since they are real stretchy. While this was a very nice, casual type wedding, he really needed to wear and wanted to wear long pants. But there was that pesky 'cage' problem. 

Valorie knows I sew a bit and she wanted to know if I could think of something to help with this problem. We came up with that great invention 'Velcro'. Valorie came to my home Thursday, July 21st,  with her Coke and supplies in hand and we headed to my craft/sewing/office in the basement. It was a total delight to visit with her while I worked away on these pants.

I introduced Valorie to the 'ripper', another lifesaving tool for any seamstress at any level. I carefully ripped out the seam in the right leg of the pants. Now that was a trip. I asked Valorie before I started which leg of the pants we needed to work on. Suddenly she wasn't sure. How to be sure. She sent her hubby a text. Bryce was asleep at home and not hearing the phone. Then I remembered he posted a picture of his leg in the cage on Facebook. We found the picture and verified it was the right leg. Whew!! It would have been really bad to go to all that work on the wrong leg of the pants.


Continuing, I ripped out the right leg side seam from the pocket to the bottom of the leg. Then I carefully stitched one side of the Velcro inside the back side of the leg seam so that part of it extended over into the open. Next I carefully stitched the other side of the Velcro to the underside of the seam on top part of the pants leg so it didn't show. Then I made another stitch down the other side of that top stitch to secure it so it wouldn't pull open when Bryce sat down. We put the Velcro together on that leg and it really didn't show up too much at all. Valorie was happy and took the pants home to see how they worked for Bryce.

Bryce got them on and he was ecstatic. He sent me a thank you note in a Facebook message. He had been wanting to wear real pants to some things and couldn't get that cage in them. Now he had some to wear to the wedding on Saturday.

Valorie was happy. The bride was happy the best man was not in shorts or sweats. It was just a happy time for this family. Such a little thing. Velcro, Such a great invention. It's like duct tape for the seamstress. Nice to have a happy moment for everyone.

The best part. When the cage comes off, we can take that ripper and take the Velcro out and restitch the seam so his pants are like they were originally intended to be worn.