How to shorten a pair of jeans while retaining the original hem.
It's really not as difficult as it seams. (Hardy har har.)
1. Put on your jeans. While wearing the shoes you will normally wear with your jeans, fold up the cuffs of your pant legs to the desired finished length. You'll probably need a full-length mirror to double check your work-stand on a box or step stool to get a good view of your feet. A good hem length is about a half-inch from the floor at your heel.
2. Once you determine the correct length, pin the cuffs in place. Take your jeans off. Find some other pants to wear. (Or just sew in your underwear!)
3 Using a seam gauge, measuring tape, or ruler, measure your pant leg from the fold to the original hem, but DO NOT include the original hem in your measurement. Divide this measurement in half.
4. Unpin each pant leg and refold using this new measurement. (Example: if you folded up 2 inches of pant leg, your new fold will be 1 inch.) Make sure your cuff is folded with right sides together- you want the original hem on the outside of the pant leg. Pin the leg all around, using your seam gauge, measuring tape, or ruler.
5. Using a nice hot iron and lots of steam, press the fold closed. Make sure to match up the side seams.
6. Sew around the circumference of each pant leg* keeping your stitches as close to the original hem as possible without sewing into the hem itself. Use a zipper foot and preferably a machine needle specifically intended for denim. When finished you should have a fold of excess fabric around the inside of each pantleg.
7. When your pants are right side out, the original hem will still be in place and there will be a seam just above it. Press everything down, then put your jeans back on and go back to the mirror to make sure your pants are the correct length.
8. If everything looks ok, go back to your iron and give everything one good press. You may wish to trim or tack the excess fabric left on the inside of your pants. If you trim, make sure you leave enough fabric to allow for fraying- a half inch is probably plenty, or just zigzag or serge around it. If you've messed up (which happens to everyone sometimes!) take a few deep breaths or grumble a few curse words, grab a beer, some chocolate, or smoke em if you've got 'em, then rip out the seams and try again! Don't get dismayed.
9. Congratulations, you're done! Admire your handywork and go brag to someone that you now know how to professionally hem your own jeans!
*Helpful hint:
Stitching over those giant seams sucks! Lots of pressing with heat and steam helps. Lowering your machine tension and tugging Ever So Slightly as the fabric leaves the machine will also help. If you get stuck and the machine keeps stitching over the same place, stop and raise the presser foot and needle and advance the fabric manually about one stitch length or so- usually that helps get everything moving again. One trick I learned online is to use a hammer or mallet to flatten the seams down before you sew. You may even wish to gently tap around the entirety of each of the seams you've made when you're done to really press everything together.
Additional resources:
http://sketchee.com/blog/2008/7/8/hemming-jeans-like-a-pro.html
http://www.denimblog.com/denim-101/how-to-hem-your-jeans-with-the-original-hem-2/
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Random Essays: Dressing Up by Nancy Bean Foster
Re-posted from her blog: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/
I remember as a little kid sitting around reading National Geographic magazine and being fascinated by all them foreign people and their interesting customs. There were women with dozens of rings elongating their necks, men in loin cloths with sticks piercing their ears and noses, Chinese girls with feet tightly bound, children running naked and unabashed through the streets of dusty villages, grandmothers gnawing on chicken feet.
I always thought these people were weird, strange, odd, or crazy because their customs and traditions were so completely different from the ones I grew up with. It didn’t occur to me until I was much older that if a photographer from a tribe in Ghana or a villager in the mountains of Peru had visited the United States to photograph the natives, they might have had their own bizarre pictures to share.
Raise your hand if you think hairy armpits on women are gross.
(Did you raise your hand? Now take a sniff. If you think body odor smells bad and wearing deodorant is normal, keep your hand up. If not, put your hand down. You stink.)
I’m pretty sure that most American men and women believe that hairy armpits on a woman are gross. Now of course there are a few naturalists who love to rub their noses in their lover’s locks, but these people also tend to be stoners and stoners think everything is awesome, even stinky pits. But the rest of us are put off by underarm hair, aren’t we?
Why does pit hair bother us so much? Does it spread disease or make us ill or put us at risk for weird sports injuries? Nope. There is no medical or hygienic reason for the adoption of shaving – somebody in the early 1900s simply thought a chick looked better in a sleeveless dress without the little Bob Marleys poking out from underneath her wings. Women have only been shaving in earnest since the 1920s and the practice didn’t become mainstream until after World War II.
But when we Americans see armpit hair on women, we grow uncomfortable, troubled, disturbed, grossed out. And we’re shocked to learn that this shaving thing, though catching on, is not par for the course around the world. We’re the weird ones when it comes to bald pits.
So why does it bother us? Because it’s different, and we humans seem to be really uncomfortable with different.
Folks seem to forget, or in some cases never realize, that we all start out exactly the same. We’re all born (with the exception of those with birth defects) with faces and hair and genitals and legs and arms and blood and skin. Our bodies in their purest form are what we come into the world with. That’s it.
Everything else is artificial – our languages and religions, what we eat, how we dress, how we adorn our bodies – these are things that our cultures have made up. They aren’t integral to our existence as human beings – they’re just expressions of where, or to whom, we were born.
I think it’s important to have an understanding of how superficial these customs we’ve adopted are because we seem to spend an awful lot of time judging each other based upon them. They don’t define us, really, do they? If I’ve got a pierce nose or a Coach bag or long fingernails that curl and twist around themselves like the limbs of a corkscrew willow, and this is all you see, you don’t really know a thing about me, do you?
Oh, we can make assumptions about each other based on these superficialities. Low-slung pants and a cap turned sideways screams gangsta wannabe. A Coach bag on your arm means you either have lots of money in the bank or not a pot to tinkle in but you’re trying to prove otherwise. A pierced nose means you’re not a committed picker. The problem is that none of these assumptions speaks to the heart of who a person is – just who a person wants to be seen as being.
So much of what we do, so much of what we use to identify ourselves culturally, is nothing more than fashion. And yet we base so many of our opinions about other cultures based on these fashions. A woman who wears a head scarf must be oppressed. A man in a loin cloth must long for Levis. We are so convinced that our way is the right way, that we fail to imagine that there exist other definitions of “normal.”
Let’s think about some of the things women in our culture do that would seem insane to a “normal” person elsewhere:
The truth is, we’re all just playing dress up. We’re all just taking these perfect blank canvases we were born with and painting them with the colors adopted by our respective cultures. We are no better than anyone else for our superficialities because simply put, if we are stripped of our fashion, we’re all pretty much the same.
Original article: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/
I remember as a little kid sitting around reading National Geographic magazine and being fascinated by all them foreign people and their interesting customs. There were women with dozens of rings elongating their necks, men in loin cloths with sticks piercing their ears and noses, Chinese girls with feet tightly bound, children running naked and unabashed through the streets of dusty villages, grandmothers gnawing on chicken feet.
I always thought these people were weird, strange, odd, or crazy because their customs and traditions were so completely different from the ones I grew up with. It didn’t occur to me until I was much older that if a photographer from a tribe in Ghana or a villager in the mountains of Peru had visited the United States to photograph the natives, they might have had their own bizarre pictures to share.
Raise your hand if you think hairy armpits on women are gross.
(Did you raise your hand? Now take a sniff. If you think body odor smells bad and wearing deodorant is normal, keep your hand up. If not, put your hand down. You stink.)
I’m pretty sure that most American men and women believe that hairy armpits on a woman are gross. Now of course there are a few naturalists who love to rub their noses in their lover’s locks, but these people also tend to be stoners and stoners think everything is awesome, even stinky pits. But the rest of us are put off by underarm hair, aren’t we?
Why does pit hair bother us so much? Does it spread disease or make us ill or put us at risk for weird sports injuries? Nope. There is no medical or hygienic reason for the adoption of shaving – somebody in the early 1900s simply thought a chick looked better in a sleeveless dress without the little Bob Marleys poking out from underneath her wings. Women have only been shaving in earnest since the 1920s and the practice didn’t become mainstream until after World War II.
But when we Americans see armpit hair on women, we grow uncomfortable, troubled, disturbed, grossed out. And we’re shocked to learn that this shaving thing, though catching on, is not par for the course around the world. We’re the weird ones when it comes to bald pits.
So why does it bother us? Because it’s different, and we humans seem to be really uncomfortable with different.
Folks seem to forget, or in some cases never realize, that we all start out exactly the same. We’re all born (with the exception of those with birth defects) with faces and hair and genitals and legs and arms and blood and skin. Our bodies in their purest form are what we come into the world with. That’s it.
Everything else is artificial – our languages and religions, what we eat, how we dress, how we adorn our bodies – these are things that our cultures have made up. They aren’t integral to our existence as human beings – they’re just expressions of where, or to whom, we were born.
I think it’s important to have an understanding of how superficial these customs we’ve adopted are because we seem to spend an awful lot of time judging each other based upon them. They don’t define us, really, do they? If I’ve got a pierce nose or a Coach bag or long fingernails that curl and twist around themselves like the limbs of a corkscrew willow, and this is all you see, you don’t really know a thing about me, do you?
Oh, we can make assumptions about each other based on these superficialities. Low-slung pants and a cap turned sideways screams gangsta wannabe. A Coach bag on your arm means you either have lots of money in the bank or not a pot to tinkle in but you’re trying to prove otherwise. A pierced nose means you’re not a committed picker. The problem is that none of these assumptions speaks to the heart of who a person is – just who a person wants to be seen as being.
So much of what we do, so much of what we use to identify ourselves culturally, is nothing more than fashion. And yet we base so many of our opinions about other cultures based on these fashions. A woman who wears a head scarf must be oppressed. A man in a loin cloth must long for Levis. We are so convinced that our way is the right way, that we fail to imagine that there exist other definitions of “normal.”
Let’s think about some of the things women in our culture do that would seem insane to a “normal” person elsewhere:
- Have you worn a pair of high heels lately? Seriously, we think it’s beautiful in this country to squeeze our feet into shoes that move our centers of gravity dangerously high putting us at risk for ankle and knee injury. With repeated use, these shoes cause corns, calluses and other foot defects that will make the simple act of walking difficult in our later years. We are deforming our feet, much like Chinese women used to, in order to be fashionable. The funny thing is, in the 20th century the Chinese finally figured out how crazy foot binding was. In the 21st century, Americans started wearing platform stilettos (because the regular kind weren’t suicidal enough).
- Because shaving isn’t bad enough, many American women go into little rooms in beauty salons, strip down to their natural states, have hot wax slathered on their genitals and muffle their screams as the wax, and their very natural hair, is ripped off. These are, of course, the same women who then hold fundraisers to end genital mutilation in Africa.
- Have you ever worn a bra or a pair of nylons or a jock strap that is actually comfortable? Seriously? Of course you haven’t.
The truth is, we’re all just playing dress up. We’re all just taking these perfect blank canvases we were born with and painting them with the colors adopted by our respective cultures. We are no better than anyone else for our superficialities because simply put, if we are stripped of our fashion, we’re all pretty much the same.
Original article: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)