I’ve been looking for shorts for the past two months and have not been able to find any that work for me. A trip to Old Navy with a Groupon yielded two pairs of shorts which have sat in their Old Navy bag for two weeks. Note to self: if you can’t even take them out of the bag then you’re not going to wear them this summer. Back to the mall! A cruise through Wet Seal was, well, discouraging. There just doesn’t seem to be much out there that falls anywhere between Daisy Dukes (which don’t cover much more than a bikini does) and matronly looking just-above-the-knee-elastic-waist-bermudas.

Then I remembered that I had a pair of shorts that I loved – except … they were leftovers from a time when high-waisted was the only thing around and now they looked more “Sierra Club hiker” than “Summer of 2011”.

Allright, this isn't me or my shorts, but they look just like the shorts I'm refashioning.

After my two discouraging mall trips I was determined to make these shorts work for me though. I should note that they are now too small for me even if I was okay with wearing them as high-waisted shorts. The rest of the shorts fit fine, but the waist was now too tight. I started by using a seam ripper to remove the waistband and the zipper. They fit better but were still too high-waisted. So I folded the waistband down towards the outside of the shorts and sewed it down creating a casing through which I slipped a stretchy shoe lace. I left the edge of the casing raw so that it would fray a bit and look deconstructed.

stretchy shoe lace = new drawstring

I didn’t need to replace the zipper with a shorter zipper as there’s a panel similar to that in boxer shorts that prevents me from flashing my undies, so I left everything as is other than adding a small velcro tab to hold everything in place.

little piece of velcro holding it all together

Now I have a pair of shorts that will be a wardrobe staple this summer and I didn’t pay a cent for them. Wish I had thought of this before I wasted all that time shopping for summer shorts.

The shorts I've been living in this summer!