Fruit From My Hands

Pinterest is covered up with posts about hemming jeans and preserving the original hem on the pant legs.  I’ve seen it over and over again.  But here is what they don’t tell you.

Stitch the hem, they say.  Iron the new hem, they say. It’s easy, they say. And, I guess it is easy. But, I feel like someone needs to be Paul Harvey here and tell the “rest of the story”.

The newly hemmed jeans will need to be washed at some point.  I know there are many opinions on washing jeans but that is for another post.  The denim will do what denim is known for doing and that is unravel.  Many consumers pay great prices for jeans with unraveled holes and tears in the denim. Unfortunately, unraveling from the inside of the hem is not considered a good thing.  This pair unraveled despite the fact that I pinked the raw edges.  The fabric of leg unraveled up into the stitching and produced a hole in the hem.

My only solution was to restitch the new hem, trying to catch as much solid fabric as I can.  I started to doubt myself and jumped on Pinterest and looked at the original instructions on this method of hemming jeans.  And, yes, I recalled it accurately.  At this point, they recommend ironing the hem flat and going on with your life.  This time I decided to press the hem flat and add a line of stitching in the ditch of the new hem all the way around the leg.  I used a dark thread so that no one would see it, but I feel that little extra line of stitches will reinforce the raw edges on the interior and help keep the hem from rolling up.

We will see how this works.  These particular jeans are the dear daughter’s and I’m sure she will alert me at the first sign of any imperfection.

Do have any experience with this new method to hem jeans?  Is is working for you? What did I miss?