|| DIY || Fixing that broken zip on your favourite shorts ||

A few months back I bought these pair of shorts from this store called Willow, which in just a few words is absolutely amazing and is by far my favourite shop.

Anyway, along with its ethnic clothing, accessories and 'homey-wear' it also stocks Retro Kitten clothing, and I bought these shorts from that very section in the shop. They were £15 (quite a bit more money than what I normally spend on clothes but I really needed some new shorts, and non-high-waisted-shorts look awful on me.)

I immediately fell in love with them, and they are unbelievably comfortable and go with literally everything I own, so they were an excellent purchase.

As you can see they are black corduroy that is slightly faded and high waisted with a slight turn up on the thigh.

About a month ago horror struck: the zip broke. Yes the zip. And as we all know, zips on clothing are super hard to fix once they've gone; once they've gone, they've gone. I wasn't too shocked in all honesty as when I bought them the zip was already slightly stiff and got caught occasionally, so when it eventually died on me it was no shocker. I was slightly distraught however, what was I going to do without my favourite shorts?! For the first few weeks I fashioned myself a quick makeshift recovery for them: safety pins. But sadly the safety pins only worked for a short period and after getting tired of people saying "your flies are down..." and me having to reply with an embarrassed "I know... they're broken..." and decided I should probably do something about it.

So here is how I fixed my beloved shorts by removing the zip and adding buttons:

The dreaded broken zip...

To start of taking the zip off, you need to unstitch it from the seam. But you have to make sure that in this process you aren't pulling the shorts apart by undoing the wrong seam.
So be careful!

The zip should start to come away from the shorts and become a separate section. 

When you get to the bottom of the zip; the 'root', it gets a bit tricky and it's hard to unstitch it without pulling the whole pair of shorts apart. So i just cut it off gently with a pair of sharp sewing scissors.

There you have it; a zip-less pair of shorts.

Unfortunately, I didn't really listen to my own advise and made a hole in the seam by taking away the zip on the left side. However it was super easy to stitch up, and the contours in the corduroy made it even easier to follow neatly.

Then I picked three buttons. I didn't have three that matched, but I attached the buttons on the inside so they weren't visible. 

I then carefully stitched the buttons on the inside of the shorts to make sure that they weren't visible when done-up. 

The buttons...

I then made a little incision on the parallel  side of the shorts for the buttons to slot into. Admittedly there was probably a far neater way to do this so that it doesn't fray ect, but I'm quite 'slap-dash' with things like this, and in all honesty I couldn't really be bothered with the hastle. 

And there we have it: my fixed shorts, restored to their former glory!