Short Pants In The Land Of Giants.

How to shorten your jeans using the original hem....

I found some spectacular dark jeans today that are a few sizes big but wearable so that my baby bump will be able to grow into them as time goes on. The only problem with the jeans was the length, because apparently only women who are 6'4 need jeans these days... The jeans were at total of $29.99 which is a great deal for Seven jeans, but I really didn't want to buy them (even though I desperately needed them) if I was going to have to pay another $25, and wait a week to wear them just to have them hemmed. I got a sewing machine for Christmas so I decided to try my hand at this sewing thing and to my surprise it went smoothly. I was able to shorten my jeans using the original hem in less than 10 minutes, Fo Real!
The photos are the illisutraion to my hemming instructions and they go clockwise ;)

1, Put your jeans on and cuff them at the bottom (we actually wore our jeans like this in high school along with three polos all with the collars popped and thought we were cool) once you have them cuffed to the desired length take the jeans off making sure not to disturb the cuff. It's okay if you only cuff one leg at a time, this will help you not get too ahead of yourself and it's easier to fix one sewing mistakes than two.
2, Pin the cuff of your jeans across the hem line. Don't pin parallel to the hem line, that will make it harder for you machine to glide over the pins.
3, Sew the new hidden hem. You'll want this hem where the orange line is placed on the picture. It's right below the original hem, give it a little space so your needle is hitting the light inner part of the pant leg and not the folded over part of the original hem. However don't venture too far below the original hem or you may end up with pants a little longer than you intended. Sew the whole cuff.
4, Move on. Cuff the next pant leg to match the first. Be sure you measure, remember it's always better to measure twice and sew once! Pin just like the first and sew likewise.
5, Take out all the pins and fold the cuff back down, tucking the fold of inner fabric up inside the pant leg. You may also want to cut this part off or trim it, depending on how long your jeans were to begin with, no one wants a five inch fold of fabric hanging out in the pant leg but you need to make sure that you leave about an inch left intact to alot for fraying. My pants were only about two inches too long so my fold was only about an inch so I left it as is and can't even tell it's there.
6, Iron it out. I actually used a flat iron (for hair) instead of a regular garment iron. It applies heat from both sides and really flatens the hem which is what you want.
7, Voila! You have jeans that fit and still have that cool stitched hemline that they were made with and your $29 jeans didn't have to become $55 jeans.