Making Track Pants from Existing Track Pants (aka “Pervert Egg” Pants)

If you’ve ever had a perfect pair of track pants, you know why you never want to let them go. They fit comfortably in both waist and length. They aren’t tight in the wrong places. They make your butt look nice – as nice as it can look in track pants anyway. Also as an aside some people might call these types of pants sweat pants, or jogging pants, but I’ve always called them track pants. For me the perfect pair were a grey pair of Beaver Canoe track pants that I bought at Target Canada circa…sometime between 2013 and 2015. And up until recently I was still wearing them. They are covered in paint from various house painting escapades, have a hole in the crotch (thanks thighs), the knees were a bit bagged out – you get the picture. It was time to let them go.

Obviously I won’t be getting the same ones any time soon, as Target has left the country. I think Roots are the original purveyors of the Beaver Canoe brand, but I didn’t like what I found there, and let’s be honest, I’m not interested in spending top dollar for sweatpants. The obvious solution was to draft my own pattern from the pants and copy them. How hard could that be? I’ve done it before and it works fine if you can get the shape right. So I attempted to do just that.

I was high on the success of making my own jeans. So I got to work. I traced the pants, which have no side seams and just one piece for each leg, elastic waist and ankle and a crotch gusset, every seam coverstitched. I did this onto an old sheet, and pinned it together to check the fit against the pants. Everything looked OK, so I didn’t bother basting it together and trying on the sheet pants. Mistake, big mistake. But they looked really good:

So, I cut my fabric and put those suckers together. I had a ton of this star fleece backed sweatshirt type stuff hanging around from Fabricland (also in about 2014) and went full steam ahead. Welt pockets, I did this kind of weirdly but they still worked. And because I was top stitching every seam with my coverstitch, I also didn’t check the fit at any point prior to being done. Mistake #2, if we’re keeping track.

Sidebar: I think I actually BROKE my coverstitch machine making these pants. I somehow broke a needle on it which has never happened in the time I’ve used it, (it was a hard to reach area and I think I was pulling it by accident) and bent a piece of the needle plate. After some careful bending back into shape it works, but it’s not working properly on thick fabric. I think the looper or needle is hitting something? So I have ordered a new plate and may have to adjust the timing if it’s still messed up after that. Great! But back to it.

So I blasted ahead full steam as I do, and after grommets were installed and elastic waist finished, tried them on, I thought to just check the length. Oh. Oh no. Something was not right. Why are the legs so tight? Why is the front rise so long? Why is there so much extra fabric bagging about my lower tummy…and why, WHY is my hand so close to my crotch when I put my hand in the pockets?!

This is the most flattering image of these pants, if you can believe that. I was standing thusly to demonstrate how the crotch is…crotching. It’s giving harem pants. Obviously something went wrong. I can’t wear these, they look ridiculous. From the side I look like Humpty Dumpty in leggings, it is NOT cute. Given the proximity of hand to crotch when in pocket, I dubbed these my “pervert egg” pants. But the construction is top tier, so there’s that.

But now I’m annoyed, and still have no pants. There was no choice. To do this properly, I needed to just sacrifice the original pants. So I cut them up along all the seams, removed the elastic, and even took apart the pocket to understand why mine had a weird seam in the middle. After laying out the pants with my pattern pieces, there were a couple of huge things that I noticed:

The front crotch? Completely wrong. Three inches too low and also three inches too much fabric, hence the harem situation. The thighs are an inch too narrow at least, contributing to the legging-ness. And the pockets were placed in the right spot for finished pants, but because the elastic drew everything together, it shifted them way forward and caused our problematic hand to crotch situation. So I traced my old pants and started over with some blue french terry that I did not even know I had. New pockets, new me.

I’m sorry about the terrible finished photo, the water spots on the mirror really bring out the fun, but I can’t seem to get a better one. These fit MUCH better than the star pants, and I can confirm they feel just like the originals other than the fabric being a bit thinner. They have 1.25″ elastic at the ankle and 2″ at the waist, grommets at the waist for the drawstring, which is secured by stitching it at the back seam. I didn’t topstitch any of the seams due to the problems with my coverstitch; the topstitching around the waist and ankle was just done with a longer straight stitch on my industrial, while stretching the elastic. And the welt pockets happily look just like the original pants. It only took me two tries this time, which I think is a new record. For fun I used variagated thread in the lower looper throughout.

With that out of the way, I will keep the Beaver Canoe pants as a pattern, and use them any time I need new track pants of this style. Not entirely sure if I’m going to try again with some of the other star fleece I have as I may be scarred for life. Perhaps that should become something for the top half of me instead. And in this weird way, my Beaver Canoe for Target Canada pants live on, hopefully for another 10 years and beyond.