Hi! I’m Kristen Kemp from projectsewingvault.com, and I’m going to show you a way to hem blue jeans that might be new for you. 

One of the sentiments I see all over the internet is how annoying it is to get approached by  friends and family that are asking for sewing favors, like hemming pants, after learning that you  know how to sew.

This is especially true if you’re a very new beginner that’s only comfortable doing small crafts and have never really worked with garments. 

As a new sewist, it is slightly terrifying to have someone approach you with a task you’ve never done before when the traditional method requires cutting garments that don’t belong to you. 

Not only that, but a nice pair of jeans will often come with fancy stitching that’s been done by industrial machines in the factory,  it will have specialty thread that’s not available at local supply stores, and usually there’s distressing that you can’t replicate if you hem by a traditional method. 

I don’t recommend hemming this way if the pants are more than 3 or 4 inches too long, because the hem could get really bulky since we aren’t cutting out any fabric. 

And that’s the magic of this method - we aren’t going to be doing anything to the pants that we can’t just take out and start over if we make a mistake. Too many new sewists get scissor happy, ruin garments and feel like failures which makes their sewing experience an unpleasant one.  

You’re going to fold the pants half of the amount you’re taking off the length.

Since these pants need to be 3 inches shorter, I’m measuring an 1 & 1/2 from the bottom of the existing hem to the fold line, which will remove 3 inches of total length.

I use pins to line up the side seams.

You'll want to make sure that your thread is the same color as the outside of the fabric, EXACTLY - get really fussy with this - because that's how this method "disappears" - or rather blends in, from a distance. 

Then, you’ll want to use a zipper foot.   Most machines come with an invisible zipper foot that’s a little different than mine, and it might work, or you can buy a separate foot from the internet for pretty cheap.   

You’ll stitch as close to the original hem as possible because you don’t want it to appear from afar like you’re adding a random horizontal line in the middle of the pants.

After you’re done stitching on the inside of the pants, you turn the pants right side out and edge stitch as close to the new seam you’ve created as you can, to squish the fold as flat as possible, so that no one can tell what you did. 

The last thing I like to do is some vertical tacking along the side seam to keep this seam from flipping down.

I also add some tacking in the front of a few stitches in the grain lines, so I don’t catch my toes in it when I get dressed in the morning. 

This method only took me 15-20 minutes to do and I’m glad I used it, because these pants ended up shorter than the customer's preference. I was able to redo them, no problem, because all the fabric was still in the garment. 

Check out the rest of the website for the classes I offer, because I’m looking to bring sewing back into common knowledge, so that you can have clothes that are actually shaped like the humans who wear them. 

Topic in this post: #AlterCasual

Kristen sews because clothes don't come shaped like humans and people often think their bodies are the problem, which is a problem.

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