How to Put in a Crochet Drawstring Cord

Crochet Drawstring Cord

There’s a good chance you’ve never crocheted a pair of pants. My recent crochet pattern, Children’s Scrubs Costume includes a pair of drawstring pants. You may wonder how to put in a crochet drawstring cord around the waist of these crochet pants. If you have sewing experience, you may already have an idea how to do this, but if not, I’ll show you below!

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Why would you put a drawstring in crochet pants?

My Children’s Scrubs Costume crochet pattern is made to look like a set of nurse’s or doctor’s scrubs, which traditionally include drawstring pants. So, in this case, it was obviously the right choice. However, drawstring pants are nice because the waist is adjustable. If you are making pants for a growing child, or for someone you can’t measure, a crochet drawstring cord allows you to create a waistband that you know will fit!

How do you put in a crochet drawstring cord?

To put a drawstring cord into crochet pants or anything else, first you’re going to crochet a few extra rows at the top. These rows will be folded over to create a casing for the drawstring. Before you make the casing though, you will also need to crochet the drawstring. You could just use a long chain, but I chose to single crochet along the chain to give it a bit more thickness.

Usually when you sew a casing for a drawstring, you put in the drawstring after you construct the casing, but for our crochet projects, it’s going to be a lot easier to set the drawstring in place and then form the casing around it.

So once you have your drawstring made, you’ll use a crochet hook to pull the ends through the front of the pants, then arrange your drawstring around the inside of the waist of the pants. Fold down the top 2 or 3 rows of the pants over the drawstring, and use yarn needle and yarn to sew down the top edge. Weave in your ends, and there you go!

You can see all of that in my video below!

What crochet patterns use drawstrings?

You may sometimes insert a drawstring into pants, skirts, bags, or even cowl-neck or hooded tops. My Children’s Scrubs Costume is a free pattern that you can find on my website.

The Children’s Scrubs Costume crochet pattern uses Lion Brand Yarn Vanna’s Choice. Lion Brand graciously provided the yarn for this design and tutorial. You can purchase the yarn for this project here.

Happy crocheting,

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