Hem Jeans by Hand - Keep Flare & Original Hem

hey everybody welcome to Jay Stern designs today what I'm gonna do is answer a subscribers question I always ask people to put their questions in comments below the video and I will help you so here is an actual video where I'm going to answer a question I thought it was a cool question and it's right up my alley so instead of just you know answering in the you know in the comments I decided I would do this short little video let me read the question from Wendy Mercer she commented hi I need help on just hemming by hand a pair of wide leg flare jeans about two inches without cutting any fabric and keeping the original hem is that possible I would love for you to do a video all right so here you go Wendy let me answer your question you can yes you can it depends on how much when you say why wide leg that's flared that's not telling me how how much flare there is so if it's a really dramatic flair these are a pair of jeans that don't fit me anymore and they have flare and it works with this much flare but if you have a significant amount of flare this technique may not work so you'll have to let me know about that and I'll give you a second option without taking apart the inseam and sort of reducing the flare because you could take apart the inseam and make the width at the hem a little bit smaller so this would work but if you don't want to deconstruct your jeans there's another option of doing this technique up near your knee you'd have a line of stitching you know let's say just right above your knee or right below your knee kind of like if you've seen people wearing leather jeans there's a seam at the knee because most leather pieces of leather aren't big enough to cut out a whole leg in one piece so they seem it at the knee so I'll just show you how you could do this technique that I'm gonna show you at the hem up at the knee if you have too much of a difference in flare between the two inches you're taking out and then the top of the hem so let me just show you quickly the first step is to mark two inches above the top of the hem not two inches from the bottom because remember part of this technique is we want to keep that original top stitching so I'm just gonna measure two inches up and I'm gonna draw a line here okay that's pretty straightforward alright so then what I'm gonna do to make it easy is I'm gonna turn the leg inside out so I'm just gonna get it so it's you know so the line is lining up with the fold like this and then I'm just gonna give it a good press and if you're working with cotton denim you don't have to worry about wrecking your fabric you can really press down hard if you're concerned that you might have some polyester or rayon mixed in with your denim maybe use a press cloth so I'm just gonna unfold it and refold it this way just because I want to get a nice crisp crease where I'm gonna be you know where I'm gonna be shortening it now if you have a piece of wood or a clapper I'm gonna use my handy dandy point perfect mini clappers pressing tool here I'm just gonna after I remove the iron I'm just gonna put this here and I'm gonna trap the heat for a second and that helps set the crease so just gonna make that nice crease okay alright so now that I have a nice crease I'm going to turn the leg right-side out again so what we want to do is we want to take this crease and we want to pin it to the top of the original hem and this is when we were gonna be able to tell if we can do it with the amount of flair in the leg so let me put up in here so first I'll do okay so this is the inseam okay then I'm gonna go around to the other side and I'm gonna do the side seam or maybe this is the side seam actually so you want those to match up so it visually looks nice and neat like that so I'm just gonna put a pin here I'm not gonna try to pin through that heavy flat felled seam so I'll put a pin on either side to hold it okay and then I'm gonna is gonna do the center front and center back these particular jeans had sort of a crease down the middle of the leg distressed into it so I can see that I'm matching that up but you just want to match it up you know so you can see you were folding it down straight okay and then I'm gonna pin here and you want to pin really close to the stitching now let's lay it flat and see how it looks you can see in the case of this pair of jeans I'll be able to do it because it can lay flat on each other the difference between the width of the head the leg here and the width at the top is not too much to do it down here so again it's gonna depend on how much flare there is you know without seeing them I can't I can't tell you you know you could try this now I'm just gonna use a light blue all-purpose thread you could use dark blue I mean the goal is gonna be obviously not to see it so I'm just gonna thread my needle and you want it to be pretty strong so I'm actually gonna make a double strand it's gonna make a knot it really doesn't matter where you start let's start here I want to be able to come up right from the inside of the crease like that so here's my my threads at the top now so basically what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go directly next to where I came out and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go under a little bit maybe I don't know maybe like an eighth of an inch and I'm gonna come back up and then I'm gonna go in the fold right above it all right and then when you pull it tight those stitches sort of disappear I'm gonna take out this pin so I don't like kill myself so now I'm up here so now I'm gonna go down here and again I'm just sliding underneath like an eighth of an inch okay so the trick to this is you really just want to be coming in and out right on top of it so if I'm right here then I'm right here all right and I'm just gonna go around like this and this is really just how you do it this would be nice nice project you know if you're watching TV and you have some downtime I want to take your time because the neater you are the less it will show so I'm just sliding my needle under you know in the inside the fold and you want to pull it really snug so in the fold one tip is don't make your thread that you're working with too long because you can get knotted up so it's better to work with a shorter thread and have to you know rethread than it is to try to make a piece that's so long that you think you're gonna make it all the way around in one shot now as I get to my inseam with this bulkiness you know I'm just gonna do the same thing maybe I'll do slightly shorter stitches because it's bulkier here you want to make sure it holds I'll take this pin out now all right so I'm gonna work my way around and then I'll join back with you but basically I'm just gonna keep doing exactly what I'm doing right now let's so you can already see how nice that's looking all right so you can see I've worked myself around I'm I'm getting really close to the end and the nice part about my progress is I don't have any gapping fabric so I was really careful to make sure that you know everything was even to this pin and so on and so forth here was this the Ince the inseam we did here's the side seam see how nice that looks okay so now I'm just gonna finish this up I'm not big for hand stitching I'll be honest so the fact that I'm enjoying this tells you it's really it's painless and it really didn't take me long probably about 10 minutes to get around all right so I'm coming up to my start point and because I want to make sure that it doesn't come undone I am just going to stitch past my start point I'm going to kind of overlap now if your bottom is a little bit wider the way you can ease that in across the whole hem is to take a slightly larger stitch when you're going across the hem then when you are going on the fold and that little tiny difference in stitch length will actually gather up or take up the extra ease that's in the bottom so a little bit longer of a stitch on the bottom a little bit shorter in the fold and that will ease in the flare very gradually the one thing you don't want to do is I'm here right you don't want to reach ahead when you go to the top you want to make sure you're staying right on top of each other or the stitches will show you can make them longer or shorter it's just they have to come in and out right next to each other all right I'm almost there I am just gonna go about a quarter of an inch past my start point all right so look how nice that looks you can't even start see where I stopped and started all right so now I'm gonna bring this to the inside okay let's take a look and see how the inside of the hem looks all right so basically how it looks is you've got that folded that the amount that we sewed the two inches is now a folded pleat on the inside of the hem and what you can do to keep that from falling if you don't want to cut it short is just tack it up in a few places so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna do a knot right here and I like to do to not so there was one knot I'm gonna double knot I always do too okay and then before I clip it I'm gonna stitch away from my knots so basically I'm gonna bury the tail in there okay so see then I can cut it right here all right so to hold it up I would just take your your depending on your jeans you probably just need to tack it up on the sides in the centers you don't let's see I can sew these together right here to keep it from flopping down and I'll do that on the inseam as well and then I may just take a couple stitches - you know at the center front and center back I'll just catch it in a few stitches but basically that's how you're gonna hold it up I put a little press here again you might want to trap the heat using some sort of clapper any piece of wood if you don't have an official clapper or again I'm using my point perfect tool here it just traps the heat look how nice that looks like I cannot even tell that I hemmed that honestly between you and me I think this comes out better but then the sewing machine version of this very nice alright so if I just want to just if your flare is too much for it to lay nicely you can do the same thing and create a seam up by the knee you know and then stitch along press that in stitch along so you can do it there if you want to or your other option would be you'd have to take apart this hem probably a couple inches on each side stitch in a little bit deeper on your inseam and then fold it up and do it right so Wendy let me know if this works for you and if you need help with other steps let me know and I'll help you or anybody else for that matter but that's how you would hand stitch hem in your jeans without cutting anything and keeping the original hem so I hope you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and clicking the little bell so you get notifications when I put a new video up I have lots of fun things planned for this year so I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you have a great day

Channel: J Stern Designs

Views: 48,922

Rating: 4.9426384 out of 5

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Id: SYRAGJF3PdM

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020