Tuesday 26 April 2011

Forever in Blue Jeans

Another beginner's sewing project - re-hemming a pair of jeans. I got an amazing pair of See By Chloe jeans from TKMaxx a year past September for the bargain price of £40. I wanted to wear them on my New York holiday that month but they were far too long. At that point getting out the sewing machine and redoing the hem didn't even occur to me so I got out my needle and thread and did some pretty terrible tacking stitching as you can see in the photo below.

This did for the holiday but because I'd had to fold up so much fabric it was starting to leave marks (see photo below).

So when I got back from New York I put the jeans back in my drawer to do at a later date.  Well I decided to bite the bullet this Spring and got them back out.  You can see just how much fabric I had to chop off below (the weird marks on the photo are greasy prints on my camera lens - sorry!).

So I looked at a few YouTube tutorials but they all seemed a bit complicated as they started giving measurements and instructions on how to re-hem using the original hem - all seemed a bit too much for me!
What I did take from them though was the advice to zig-zag or overlock the cut off edge so it doesn't fray.  I chose to do a zig-zag stitch on this.  Then I measure the jeans on me, pinned them, checked they were both even, and cut into the jeans.  I found thread that was as near a match as could be, after asking for help in John Lewis about the right kind of thread to use on jeans.  I did a straight stitch, very small, and I think it looks like a pretty good match.  I wore them out on Thursday night and they haven't come undone or frayed yet so I'm pretty happy - new jeans for the summer yay!


3 comments:

  1. I totally forgot to mention the difficulties I had to begin with. Every time I started the hem the thread just got all clogged up. It took me absolutely ages - many times of taking out the bobbin, rethreading the whole thing - to work out that somehow I must have bumped the thread tension knob on the front of the machine and set it to too high a tension - at least I'll know now and not make the same mistake again!

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  2. the material for these jeans looks so comfortable!!!
    You need to get a sewing machine that can go into such material. I know the feeling. I put a patch on someone's jeans once and broke 3 needles doing so!!! horrible!

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  3. Yes, someone had told me about the possibility of breaking needles sewing denim - my only precaution was to wear my glasses rather than contacts, I'm not really sure it would have provided much protection from a flying needle but I'm quite accident prone so thought it was better to be safe than sorry! They are really comfy jeans and it's so nice to think of all the things in my wardrobe needing fixed that I now have the confidence to do, even if the skills are still slow in coming!

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