How to Hem Jeans Using the Original/Existing Hem - Looks Like They Haven't Been Altered!

hey there i'm danny truster from trester taylor in rochester minnesota this is taylor yourself in this video i'm going to show you how to shorten the length or the hem on a pair of jeans or casual style pant by doing what's called an original hem or also a euro hem this technique will allow us to preserve the original stitching and wear marks that were on the pants and make it look like it hasn't been altered to do an original hem you'll need a couple of things you want a scissors to cut the excess off you'll want a ruler and tailor's chalk to mark where our hems are going to go and you'll want some thread that matches the blue part of the jeans some larger items that you want is a sewing machine a serger if you have one or a sewing machine that does a zigzag stitch and then to press it we'll need an ironing board or a flat surface with a towel and then an iron with some steam the first step to doing a hem is transferring the marks that we've made when we did our fitting to the rest of the pants that we have lines that we know where we're going to do the hem doing an original hem is a little bit different than a rolled hem on a rolled hem we measure for extra fabric after the mark where we want our hem to be on an original hem we kind of go above that because we're going to take off the old hem and then put it back on so we're essentially adding length so it's going to be a little bit different than measuring for a regular hem before you mark your lines you want to make sure that you've lined up the pants from the side seam to side seam this is going to make sure that the lines are even front to back sometimes you have to kind of shake them out a little bit to get them to line up and then you lay them back on the table so then we'll make sure our chalk marks go to the edge of the fabric of the fold so it's a little bit easier to see and then we'll line up the two lines against one another so then we'll take our ruler and that'll be the edge of where we make our chalk mark so we know where to go when you're marking a hem one thing you want to make note of is if there is a taper to the pant you want to kind of account for that so if we just put the ruler flat on here and mark that there might be a peak a little bit on the front and the back so to make sure we don't have that we'll sort of grab the pants a little bit further up the leg and bring that in and that sort of this peak that the pants have is going to flatten out a little bit it's a pretty minor thing but sometimes you have a really tapered pant and it's very obvious this one has it just a little bit so that's going to help us make sure that the line is the same all the way around so once we've done that and it's laying nice and straight we'll lay our ruler where our chalk marks are and then take our trailer's chalk and run it up and down the ruler to make transfer that mark to the rest of the pan and then we'll flip the one leg over and mark that on the insides and again flip it over and mark it on the bottom so now there should be chalk marks all the way around both legs and sometimes on the bottom it's a little bit less defined so you can always go back over that with your chalk and ruler and really make that defined so if we had not pinched the leg there could have been a little peak kind of like that or like that and we don't want that we want a nice straight line all the way across so by sort of pinching that leg that helps to correct that so this measurement here is going to be our finished hem length and like i said because we're going to take off the existing hem and put it back on we want to measure up from this measurement because we're going to be essentially adding fabric back on so on a normal roll temp it seems odd because you want to go leave length so that you can make the hem but since the hem is already made we're going to be adding it back on we don't want the hem to end up too long we want to make sure that we go up from where the finish measurement is so to avoid confusion and to make sure that you've got the right finished length when you're done i usually take a ruler and measure the length of the ruler and make a mark on the leg so when i'm done i can check this measurement and if it's 12 inches or whatever the length that you chooses i just do it because it's the whole length of the ruler and then i don't have to remember specifically a number because sometimes you get busy inside track this is going to be my benchmark to check that i've done it right so now do the same thing on the inseam of the other pant so now i know when i'm done i can check this measurement up here to where our finished hem is and if it's 12 inches we know we've measured correctly so as i said because we're going to be adding fabric back on we're going to go up and measure another line and that's going to be the line where we sew the hem back on and this measurement depends on the width of the hem if you've got a wide hem that's an inch or an inch and a half you're going to want to measure the width of the hem up from where our finished hemline is if that makes sense because we're going to be we're going to be adding that back on so we have to make sure we subtract that from the length of the pan because we're putting that back on so this jean measures a half inch for its hem and that's pretty typical of this style of pant on jeans or casual style pants they usually have half inch but sometimes they go up to an inch and a quarter so we'll measure from our marked line where our finished 10 is going to be a half inch up because we're going to be adding that half inch back on and then we'll do the same process we'll mark all the legs so we'll kind of make sure we have our pinch there and then we'll mark that and flip through all the layers and making sure there's marks all the way around on both legs and again the bottom might be a little undefined so you can run back over that and sharpen that line up a little bit so one last thing you want to do before you cut the scraps off is i like to make markings to denote which scrap goes to which leg because the pant leg is not symmetrical from side seam to side seam when you try to sew the legs back on sometimes if you can get them confused and you try to sew it on and it doesn't fit because the seams aren't lining up i make distinctive markings so i know which scrap goes to which leg so on one i'll put x's and another i'll make kind of this little stick line so that i know these go to those so now that we've got everything prepped and marked we'll cut off the hems and then prep it to sew it back on now that we've got our hems cut off we'll need to encase the raw edges so that they don't fray when they're washed and worn there's two ways that you can do that one is to use a serger which is what we have here the other way is to use the zigzag stitch on your sewing machine i'll show you how to do both if you don't have a serger that's okay it'll work just fine with the zigzag stitch if you're not familiar with a serger it's a machine that has multiple threads that stitch at the same time and sort of wrap the edge of the fabric so that the little edges are cut off at the same time and you get a really nice clean finish on there you can get similar thing with a zigzag stitch on the sewing machine but it just doesn't have as much of a clean finish as it would with a serger so from now on we'll be working with the pants inside out and we want to make sure that we've got the correct scrap with our leg because i'm going to show you how to do half of it with the zigzag and half of it with the serger i want to make sure that i have do both of the same methods so that they match together these parts have the x's on them so we'll do these with the serger and the one with a little stick mark we'll do with the zigzag i've put navy thread on the machine it doesn't really matter what you use because the scraps are going to be on the inside you're not going to see that but i like to try to match as close as i can so navy kind of matches the blue jeans a little bit better also our stitch length you're going to want something that's kind of middle of the road you don't want a really small surge that is going to stitch in one little spot and if there's especially stretch in the jeans it will pull it and stretch it out and you don't want something that's so wide in between that it doesn't properly encase the raw edges and you get a bunch of fraying so kind of in between will work really well for this so you can put your scrap on your machine and the really cool thing about a serger is that it will cut it has this blade here it will cut as we sew so we don't have to worry about cutting all this excess off we'll just kind of push and angle the scrap so that the foot comes in line with this old rolled hem here and i like to do this with the outside facing down so that we can push our foot further into here and we get a nice cleaner line and it's easier to go over some of these thicker seams when you do it from the inside of the scrap so you just kind of go around once you get to that foot there just kind of keep the foot running along the edge of that rolled hem and i go a little bit past where we started so that we get a nice clean line here because we sewed this on the inside sometimes if you sew it like this you'll get like a little bump on the thicker seams if you have a really thick seam so by sewing it with the inside facing you the foot can go over these thicker seams a little easier so you get a nice cleaner cut there so now we'll do our leg and we'll start on the inseam and this one we don't want to cut anything off because we've already got our cut edge so we're just going to run that blade along the edge that's already been cut so we got a nice even line on there and it's really sharp and clipped all those edges off so now that we've got this leg serged i'll show you how to do it on the other leg using the zigzag stitch on your sewing machine to do the zigzag you want to set your stitch length to something that is about an eighth of an inch apart from one another and then about a quarter inch wide you want something that is going to be wide enough that it encases the edge of the fabric and won't pull out and you don't want to do it too close that you're sewing in one spot and might get a thread jam so you can take a piece of fabric as scrap and sort of play around with your settings and try to figure out what works for you this one i was previously making a buttonhole so it's a very small stitch we want it a little bit bigger than that so i think that will work pretty well we've got about an eighth of an inch in between the stitches and then it's about a quarter of an inch wide we could go a little bit wider but i think that'll work well for our purposes this machine is just a regular straight stitch zigzag machine and does not have a cutting blade so we'll need to cut the scrap before we can sew that raw edge so you'll want to cut about a half inch up from where the old hem stitching line is we don't want to get it too narrow we don't want to go any smaller than a quarter of an inch but a half inch is ideal so the width of the hem on this one is a half inch so we'll kind of go by that and then we'll just take the scissors and go around and cut that all right and again to make sure we're corresponding the correct leg with our scrap this is our kind of weird stick line and then our weird stick line so we've got those so we'll take our scrap and working from the inside we'll make sure that our zigzag needle is lined up all the way to the right when it's all the way to the right that it's lined up with the edge of our scrap and then we'll just go all the way around and when you're zigzagging you want to make sure that you're catching just the edge of that fabric that we can maximize our stitch width across the fabric [Applause] and you can see how that's encasing that edge there [Applause] all right so now we've got our scrap zigzagged and secured and you may find there's some little threads that get pulled out as you're sewing but you can just snip those it should be fine and now we'll do our pant leg so now that we've got everything secured we can attach our scrap back onto the rest of the pant and recreate the hem the thread that we put on is a thread that matches the outside fabric whatever blue color that is there's an extra step in here that you don't have to do but that i like to do that i'll show you in a bit but it's important that the thread that you use matches the outside so that it can camouflage itself as best as possible so we'll take our scrap to our corresponding pant leg this one has a weird stick mark whatever you want to call that so what you want to do is again working with the pants inside out you'll want to put the right sides together and by that i mean the sides that are going to be visible on the outside you want to put those so that they're touching each other and we want to line up our seams so this inseam on the scrap has this top stitching so we'll match it up with the inseam on here and these are the two sides that are going to be visible so we'll put those together and another thing that you could do to make sure it's everything lines up properly is if you hold these together you can see that the stitching on here lines up with the stitching on this pant you want to hold those where they are lined up and then sometimes you can put a pin through there and that will help hold it together so that when you sew it doesn't shift and that they'll line up and look like it's one of those little tricks that make it look like it hasn't been altered so then we'll put this under our machine and for our stitch length um you want a kind of a medium stitch length not super long not super short you don't want to sew in the same spot i've got mine set about three and a half which is three and a half millimeters but anywhere from two to three and a half would be fine when we start sewing this we will sew just to the right of that old stitch line where that gold is but we want to sew on this blue part here not on the inside scrap part the wider part but we want to sew just along that stitch line and when we flip that over our seam we're going to be creating a seam basically is going to be right above that stitch line so it's important that you stitch right along there and not too far onto the scrap here so we'll sink our needle to get started and roll over the seams a little bit by turning the wheel because it's a little bit thick and you don't want to break a needle and then what you also want to do is line up the stitch line on your scrap with the marked chalk line that we made so as you can see this is lined up the stitch line is marked lined up with our chalk mark there and it's a little bit easier on this specific one because we've made our scrap allowance a half inch and then our chalk mark is a half inch from this edge here so the fact that they're both half inch you can pretty much just put the two raw edges together and they'll line up along our chalk marks so we'll just go ahead and stitch forward again just to the right of that old stitch line and before you get too far you want to make sure that you're lining up the seams on the side so that those line up as well we could put a pin through there if we take our pin out and we look those seams are lining up great if we take our pin out from our start point those seams have lined up pretty well so we'll just keep going making sure we're lining up our chalk mark with where our stitch line is and we're stitching again right to the right of that old stitch line on this blue part and again i'm walking the wheel over that side seam because it's a little thicker there and if we turn it inside out we can see that the seam is right above that old stitch line so it's really going to camouflage the fact that we've added a seam there and our side seams line up and that seam lines up really well so we'll do one extra step and you don't have to do this but i find that it's really helpful to make sure that everything lays kind of flat because when you do an original hem you're adding layers of fabric to the inside of the hem and it can get a little bulky also over time that seam allowance that we have here that can flip down and can be visible so in order to keep that up and keep everything lying flat i like to top stitch or stitch along the top part of the seam that we've just made above the old stitch line so that's why it's important to have a matching thread color because it's really going to camouflage that stitch line that you won't see that but it will lay nice and flat so again we'll start at the inseam and sink our needle and i'm using my hands to sort of pull apart the two pieces of fabric so that the stitch line doesn't get buried in there and is still visible and then i'm just going to go around separating that seam so as you can see that stitch line we've made just there is barely visible especially when it's down at the floor when someone's wearing it no one's ever gonna see that but it's just one extra tip so that it lays nice and flat so if you turn the pant leg unset out a little bit you can see that even though we haven't pressed this it's laying nice and flat and that's something that you really want because like i said when you do the original hem you're adding layers and bulk to it so you want it to lay as nicely as possible and then one extra thing that we'll want to do is tack our side seams we're going to kind of stitch in the ditch or stitch in where that seam is and that's just one extra thing that's going to make sure that these seam allowances don't flap down and they stay where they should so we can just lay that under the machine and then line your needle up with where the seam is and then stitch back and forth a few times and then we'll go to the inseam and this one's a little bit different because it it has the seam allowance lapped to one side so we'll just go to the very side of where that seam is and stitch a few times and because our thread color matches so well no one's going to see that anyhow now that we've finished with the one leg we'll repeat those steps and do the other so again checking our marks this one's an x this one's an x even though we've already sewn the other one we've already checked our marks we just kind of want to double check sometimes you never know so these both have x's on them so we'll take our inseam on the jeans and seam on the scrap and line those up and we want to line up the seams you could put a pin there to hold them together and then we're going to stitch just to the right of that old stitch line make sure we're lining up our old stitch line with the chalk mark or the edges of our fabric i'm just noticing this here these are the ones that we've serged and this is the one that we've zigzagged you can see that the one that we've serged secures the raw edges a little bit better this one again will do a fine job just over time you might get some of these little fuzzies but a serger does work really nicely and has a lot more clean finish and we're just gonna go all the way around the leg making sure everything's lined up we're lined up just to the right of that stitching we're gonna make sure that our side seam is lined up when we get to there so all those seams line up so so our inseam lines up and the out seam lines up pretty well sometimes if you just kind of pull on it it'll line up just fine so yeah that's pretty good there so now we will go and do our top stitching so that it lays nice and flat and again i'm pulling the two pieces apart so that it lays nice and flat and the stitching is visible it should say the old hemline is visible you don't want it to get buried in the seam there and then you can't see it and then that defeats the purpose of doing the original hem and again we'll tack up our side seams and there you can see our top stitching line is invisible and everything is laying nice and flat so now that we've got everything sewn back together we'll double check the measurement we made earlier to make sure that we've got the correct length and we'll give it a press before we press we're going to turn our pants right side out so that we can check the measurement we made on the side seams to make sure that we've got the correct length flip them inside out right side out and you can take your ruler whatever you used earlier to determine that length and double check that and on this one we've got 12 inches is what we marked for and the other is also 12 inches so we're spot on for where we should be for the length we know we've done a good job making sure that we've measured and marked everything correctly so now to press it i'm going to turn them right inside out again so that we can get the iron right on that seam we just sewed so it lays nice and flat so you just want to put that in there use the weight and steam of the iron to press that flat get off any left behind chalk marks [Music] and then we'll turn them right side out and just press the outside again get rid of any chalk marks that we have on here there are a number of ways that you can do an original hem one of the ways i've seen is by taking apart the old hem and inserting the seam allowance underneath that and then stitching it back together for me that sort of defeats the purpose of an original hem the purpose is to preserve the old stitch line and the wear lines on there so if you're taking that stitching out it may be hard to duplicate again if you do also do it that way you're going to make the hem that's already a little bit bulky because you've got a couple rolls of fabric on the inside you're going to add in two extra layers so that's going to create even more bulk so instead of spreading that thickness out from here through the hem having this all be one thickness here it's just going to make a super bulky hem so doing that way defeats the purpose of keeping the stitching and it makes the hem at the very bottom a little bit more bulky so if you do it this way where you stitch up and top stitch the seam allowances on the inside flat this will lay nice and crisp and it will really disguise that seam that we've put on there and make it look like it hasn't been altered for more information and courses including downloadable pdfs visit our website at tailoryself.com and always remember measure twice cut once thanks for watching you

Channel: Tailor It Yourself

Views: 239,175

Keywords: how to hem jeans, hem pants, how to, tutorial, euro hem, french hem, shorten jeans, shorten pants, make pants shorter, keep original hem, preserve stitching

Id: bc8hwF7f5oQ

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021