Sunday, October 24, 2010

Blindly Hemming

I've been hemming and hawing now for 2 weekends.  When you are short like me, you usually have think about hemming pants.  I refuse to be one of those people who just rolls up the pants and says "screw it".  I don't find it fashionable.  I also refuse to pay someone to hem them because I can sew and there is no reason I can't do it myself.  I've even been paid numerous times to sew things for people, so I know I can do it.  It's just a matter of sitting down to do it because it's so simple.

Usually, I just hem them by cutting them if necessary and then folding a hem and sewing with a regular foot.  You see this on most casual pants and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing offensive.  But if you look at some of your classier pants that have been professionally hemmed, you will find a rather fancy stitch that looks like this.
  Why would you even look at your hem?  Most normal people probably don't even know it's there.  Anyway, it does a really neat thing by sewing on the piece that you've folded and it leaves little tiny stitches on the outside but they are hardly detectable.  Really, you can hardly see those little flecks in the bottom picture.  


So what makes this magic happen, you ask?  You need a blind hemming foot because this called a blind hem.  I never knew that this foot could do such a thing, but I've used it twice and it really is magic. I used to be afraid of it because it looks like it would break the needle.

Last weekend, I sat down to hem these very pants and just about lost my mind.  There is a little bit of mental work involved in making the blind hem work.  You have to figure out which fabric you want on top and your brain really doesn't believe that all of the stitches won't show through.  It takes me a lot of twisting and turning the fabric and moving it around a lot before it makes sense to me.  After 4 attempts last weekend, I gave up. I almost skyped my sister a-ster (who sews really well) to walk me through it.  That shows how desperate I was.  See, neither of us ever had any sewing lessons, we've just figured it all out as we've gone and she has far more patience than I do, so she has figured out some really nifty things.  Especially on her serger.  But if I were to call her for help, that would really annoy me because it would mean I haven't figured it out.

Then I tried just doing a regular hem and I couldn't even make that happen.  It's all probably because I was in a hurry to wear them that afternoon (to a lia sophia show where I literally did not make ONE sale and had to drive an hour each way to get there and smell CANDLES the entire time which my nose does not appreciate).  So, not really caring if I have them to wear to my show this afternoon, I gave it another whirl by looking at the first pair I did a while back ( I knew if I personally had done it once, I could somehow channel that knowledge again and make it work).  All of a sudden, light dawned and we had a beautiful hem.




I like my hem on these kinds of pants to fall just above the bottom of the heel of my shoe.  This poses a problem because I wear different heels, mostly not very high.  I will never be able to wear these with total flats.  But that's OK because they will be ass kicking gorgeous with all of my slightly to very high heeled shoes.  These are the marvelous pants that I walked into Ann Taylor Loft, tried on and they instantly worked on me.  Very rare.

I especially like how they show off my derriere.  I'll leave you with a look at my super fine ass.  Just kidding, I can't seem to get a clear picture of my but-tocks by myself.  I'll leave it to your imagination.

1 comment:

  1. I am 5'3 so I hear you on pants. That is so cool that you can hem. I can't. I can sew by hand a little like with buttons, but not anything else!

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