Emergency Suspenders/Braces

When my husband and I woke up at 3:15 a.m. to go on trek, he realized he'd packed his suspenders/braces and had given them to the equipment committee nearly two days prior!!  Oops!  I was determined to make him some "po-boy" (poor boy) suspenders on the 7 hour bus ride so he wouldn't lose his pants (which were rather loose as they were based on a period pattern and I hadn't altered them to be tighter).

Luckily, I found some wide twill tape left over from some bedspread packaging, which saved me some sewing. When I put 1.5 pieces of the twill tape together, they were just the right length. All that was left to do was to hem them and add button holes. I was sure glad I'd learned to make button holes within the last year! The only problem was the humongous piece of velcro connecting the pieces.  But hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, and this was just trek, not an actual re-enactment.

This is what I came up with.

Sorry about the twist in the picture. I was too tired to stand up and fix it.

He's trying to rest here.

Not to bad, eh?  Too bad he popped off one of his buttons in the Sweetwater River water fight, and I didn't bring any spare buttons.  I guess I could have made one if we'd been desperate enough.