Sewing a hem is not complicated, but it does take patience. Marking and turning up a dress or skirt hem is the time consuming part of hem sewing. Precise marking makes the difference between an uneven hem that detracts from your garment and a professional looking finish that adds to the piece’s overall look.

To mark the hem of a skirt or dress, have a friend help you. Try on the garment wearing the undergarments that you will wear with it, since they do make a difference in the way the garment fits and the way it hangs. Have your friend mark the distance from the floor to your finished hem length, using a yardstick or a specially designed hem marker. Straight pins placed parallel to the floor at 2 or 3 inch intervals give an accurate marking; place the pins around the entire length of the skirt. If you must do this by yourself, there is a special device on a stand which marks the hemline using a hand operated bulb with blows powered chalk.

The next step is to press the hem into place. Turn your garment wrong side out and put it on your ironing board or another flat padded surface. Turn the garment up along the marked line. Match each seamline and put a pin at right angle through both layers of fabric. Continue this way all around the hem, placing the pins about 1” or 1 ½” If the fabric is not slippery you can space the pins wider apart. Press the hem in place, using the appropriate iron setting for your fabric. Now you are ready to sew your hem.

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If your garment fabric ravels, you will need to finish the edge of the hem in some way; material that does not ravel requires no edge finish. The simplest and in my opinion, neatest looking edge finish is to press under ¼” along the raw edge of the turned up hem. You can either use a straight machine stitch to finish this or you can accomplish the finishing in one step as you hem. If you want to use a machine stitch, carefully stitch close to the fold of the narrow turn up.

You can either machine stitch the hem of your garment in place or you can sew it by hand. The classic hand sewing stitch for hems is the blindstitch; as the name implies, this stitch does not show much on the right side of the garment. A hand blindstitch is a good choice for delicate fabrics and formal styles. If this is your first time using the blindstitch, you will want to practice on scraps of fabric before tackling your finished garment.

Taking your time and using tiny stitches are the two keys to sewing a good blindstitch. Fold the hem edge back a little and hold it as you work. Knot the thread and pull the needle through so that the knot is on the inside of the garment. Pick up just one or two threads of the material in the skirt body about ¼ “to the left of where the thread is fastened; now pick one or two threads in the hem, about a ¼” away from the first stitch. Going from right to left, continue alternately picking up a thread or two in the garment and a thread or two in the hem. Try to keep the stitches spaced evenly. Fasten off by running your needle back under several stitches; cut the thread close to the stitching.

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