Teaching Sewing and Alterations for Fun or Profit
This is a close up of a rolled hem: You’ll find them on prom dresses, wedding dresses, casual dresses, skirts and men’s shirt tails. In fact, they are found on all sorts of garments made from all sorts of fabrics. You can make a rolled hem “by hand”. You simply press up 1/8″ along your hemline…
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This is what a serged hem looks like up close: Maybe you have a dress, skirt, shirt or even a scarf that really needs this type of hem. You can duplicate this look with your serger (and I’ll give some pointers for how to do this on your sewing machine at the end of this…
Read MoreRecently, a reader inquired about how to hand sew a hem. So, let’s walk that through together. There are many techniques and stitches that can be used, so I just want to say up front that this is not the final word in hemming, but I hope it will help. First, if you would like to look at…
Read MoreDoes your machine come with a blind stitch hem foot? Have you used it before? Most of the time, it is used for stitching hems, but some folks use it to stitch down appliques for quilting or decorating clothes or hand towels. They can make a hem look rather professional. (I used contrasting thread here, but…
Read MoreHave you ever tried to hem a pair of pants and by the time you were nearly finished sewing it, you realized that you were going to get puckers? It happens to the best of us. But, how do you avoid it? I couldn’t find the answer anywhere in books or on the internet, so I devised…
Read MoreDo you have trouble hemming stretchy knits? They can be tricky. Let’s look at the various ways to hem knits so that they don’t stretch out. Then, we’ll look at some alternatives and see if they work as well. This dress is a customer’s. Her dog chewed the hemline and she brought it to me…
Read MoreYou may have a serger or overlock machine that doesn’t have automatic threading capability. I don’t either. But I’ve found a way that makes a nice shortcut, so I wanted to show you how to thread a serger quickly. Until I learned this threading shortcut myself, it took so long for me to thread a…
Read MoreFor many years I lived without a serger (also called an overlocker). First of all, they weren’t even invented when I started to sew. But even years after they were available, I still hadn’t forked over the money to buy one. I hemmed (no pun intended) and hawed about the cost and wondered if I’d ever…
Read MoreI realized after posting yesterday on How To Hem a Pair of Pants that are Flared that I hadn’t shown you how to hem a pair of straight leg pants (or skirts. The application here can be applied to both.) So, let’s look at how to hem pants and skirts. In this post, I will…
Read MoreYesterday, we covered how to hem your jeans the professional way. There’s also a post entitled, How To Hem Jeans Using the Original Hem, and both of these posts recommend that you use a Jean-a-ma-jig to help you hem them easier. A Jean-a-ma-jig, what is that? Well, they are a tool that helps you maneuver…
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The Sewing Garden 