The seekrit hem for store bought jeans

Women’s jeans do not come in real lengths.  Yeah some brands will give you regular, medium and long but that honestly isn’t much help.  It never fails when I buy jeans they need hemmed.  I remember that when my mother would hem our pants that everyone could tell, it just never looked the same.  Maybe that is because in the 80s jeans were all acid washed and worn a new hem stuck out like a sore thumb.  Until someone at work showed me how she put a hem in her jeans, see grad students are an excellent source of information.  I believe that she did it by hand I on the other hand am really lazy and use my sewing machine.  It’s such a great way to hem pants I am going to share.  And honestly I can hem a pair of pants in the morning before work and still make it to work on time.

How this works is that instead of chopping off the nice triple folded and perfectly stitched hem and creating a new one we are going to fold the excess material and stitch a seam along the original hem, fold the extra material up and tack it in place.  Now I am sure that if you wanted to you could cut the extra off and edge it to keep it from fraying but that just seem like extra work and more thread.

Here I am using the zipper foot to get as close as possible to the hem edge as I can.  The closer the better this helps hide the fold.

Once you are done you will basically have a flap of folded material on the inside of your pant leg.

Fold this flap upward, I like to press the all the seams at this point and then stitch along the side seams, no need to worry about matching the thread exactly as it is in the seam.  I use black thread on dark denim. Close is good enough. I also “tack” the flap in a few places along the middle. I use a locking stitch make a stitch or two and lock stitch again, this one just has extra thread but I trimmed it off.

Here is what your folded hem now looks like.

Yes if you look closely you can see it but if someone is looking at your ankles that close you should kick them!