Knee Pad Pants

Well, this is my first Instructable, so be gentle.

I've been remodeling a 180 year old farmhouse for over a year now.
Let that sink in for a while....
Everything you can think of needs torn down and rebuilt, or refinished etc...
Also, I'm pretty sure that they didn't use a level or ruler to build the place.

Anyway, my latest endeavor was to relocate the wood stove brickwork from a corner location to a position closer to the chimney. This required me to spend several days on my 60 year old knees, assembling the masonry pad and wall. And of course, my good knee pads were mysteriously missing from their storage location.

Well, I had to resort to using one of my wife's gardening pads. These work great but I was constantly having to re-position them, and I was up and down a hundred times moving bricks and mixing mortar.

I got the project done but vowed to find my knee pads. Did I lend them? Were they borrowed? Is it the work of a disgruntled night elf? The mystery continues.

This coming week I'm going to be working on the living room, removing the carpet and refinishing the hardwood floor. Guess who still can't find his knee pads?

Anyway, I have this pair of blue jeans that have really long cuffs for some reason. (My mommy must have bought them for me.) I was looking at the garden pads and my rolled up cuffs at the same time and thought "I've got to get my car inspected before the end of the month." (It's an age related issue)

So here is my Instructable about making a pair of "Knee Pad Pants"

Here are my too long work pants that we cut 7 inches off of. (Full disclosure - we used a pair of scissors to do this.)

The cutoff material will be used to make the knee pad pockets. If your pants are already the right length, you could just turn another old pair of jeans into shorts and use the left over material or you could go to your local sewing shop and buy some material but I think that would be wrong somehow.

Tools: Scissors, box cutter, measuring tape and sewing machine or someone to sew for you.

Materials: Pair of long pants or fitted pants with some extra material, and an old (or new) garden pad.

Here are several gardening pads that use around the house and shop. I picked the smaller pink one because it was the thickest not because it was the prettiest. I used a box cutter to cut the pad into 2 equal sized pieces, each 6" x 7".

After trying these out in the finished pants I realized that they were too flat and stiff. They were a little uncomfortable and made the pants ride up a little. I cut a "V" notch down the length on either side with a box cutter which helps them to form better around the knees.

Here we see the cuff material, the knee area of the pants marked for location and the knee pad section. Also a pic of the finished pocket with the pad partially inserted.

Why is the pocket upside down you say? Well, it can't fill up with sawdust or cement dust this way.

Won't it fall out? Not really, there is enough friction to hold it in. If you do make the pocket too loose to keep the pad in place, you could add a strip of Velcro or just use a safety pin if you are really desperate.

My wife is an expert seamstress and squirreled these off to her sewing room (where I'm not allowed) and sewed the pockets on for me. She said she just folded the edges over and stitched them on, so I'm taking her word for it.

Here you can see me modeling the finished product both standing and kneeling.

They work really good and unlike my missing knee pads, they don't have straps digging into the back of my knees, they come off when my pants come off and I don't have to drag around or hunt for a gardening pad that I left somewhere.

Hopefully I can sweet talk my wonderful wife into converting a few more pairs for me. (hint, hint)

I'm sure there are going to be comments about me not showing how the pockets were actually sewed on but I think I adequately addressed that in the "age related" note at the end of the introduction.