How to Hem Over a Hem

How to Hem Over a Hem
Hi this is Andrew on behalf of Expert Village.com and in this next clip I am going to be showing you how to hem over a hem. This would be necessary when you for instance buy a pair of pants that is too long but you wear them anyway and you wind up stepping on them and after a while the bottom of the cuff hem is damaged. So usually in this case you would be able to cut off that excess material and re-hem it but in this case the hem is going to be a little too small for that so cutting it off would be more difficult than it is worth. So in this case I would just create a new hem over the original by folding it in and then marking it once I have the pants on to a length that is going to be suitable and not be stepped on all the time and then go through the process of ironing it and making sure that it is flat and making sure that it is an equal distance all the way around the cuff. Then I am going to take a thread of any color that I choose and in this case I am going to keep it the same as the material, an orange color and then I am going to make my first anchor stitch on the hem of the original pants at the seam. And you do that by simply bringing the needle through at the seam line and you want to do that a couple of times and when you bring this through you want to bring the needle underneath the loop to create a knot and you pull that tight and that will create a nice anchor stitch for you to finish the hem with. Then I want to continue hemming where I bring the needle in, grab some material. I don’t want to go all the way through the pants. I just want to grab a little bit on the inside and then bring that through the folded area which will secure the new hem. Every time you do this you want to go back through the original stitch. It is not necessary to go through the entire material, just the outside folded part and create a back stitch to hold it in place. This way if any part of your hem ever starts to unravel, it is going to stop at the adjacent stitch. It is not going to continue unraveling throughout the entire length of the hem. I just want to continue this process all the way around the pants until I have a completely new hem line that should be just as good and strong as the first but now the appropriate length.