How To Hem Pants

Hi, I'm Claire Louise and I'm a theatrical wardrobe mistress working in the west end of London. Today I'm going to be sharing with you some of my tips and tricks on how to get the best out of clothing repairs and alterations. In this video I'm going to show you how to hem trousers.

Now I'm using a sleeve board which is a really great way of doing trouser alterations and if you want to do several of these I would recommend investing in one. I'm also using a iron-off tailors chalk, which is a kind of waxy tailors chalk, again doing lot of alterations, this is a real speed saver. So I need to shorten these trousers by and inch and a half, so I'm going to mark a new hem line, all the way around with my iron-off tailors chalk.

If you don't have iron-off tailors chalk you can use regular tailors chalk and just make your line sightly narrower than the actual width and make sure that's pressed on the inside. Now I'm just going to use a quick unpick and undo all my original stitching, which I've already done. And then I'm just going to fold my new hem up inside my trousers, and then sliding it back on my sleeve board, I'm going to press a nice, crisp hem.

By pressing before we stitch, it gives us a really professional finish. And this iron-off tailors chalk is disappearing as I'm ironing. It is worth testing your fabric first to make sure that it does disappear.

And then I'm removing my trousers from my sleeve board and you can see I've got a really nice, sharp crease for my new hem. I don't want all of this extra fabric around my hem so I'm just going to run around and trim some of this excess to about an inch. Taking my pins I'm just going to pin this hem flat ready for stitching.

I'm going to do a stitch called an invisible hem and to do that I'm going to flip this hem to the outside, and I'm just going to do my stitches inside that little fold there. I'm going to stitch this in white just so that you can see what I'm doing. And I'm starting by passing a knot underneath the fabric.

And doing a back stitch and that's just to make sure my stitching is nice and secure. And then I'm just opening up that fold and taking one stitch and a tiny bit of the outside fabric and then a stitch into the seam allowance, and then a tiny little bit of the fabric and a stitch into the seam allowance. I'm going to do this all the way around my trousers.

This stitch goes in a left right direction, and depending on how neat you want it depends on how close your stitches are. On much thicker fabrics I can get away with taking more fabric when I take a piece up from the body of the trousers. and then I come back to the beginning I'm just going to secure into the hem allowance with a couple of back stitches on the last back stitch I'm going to go through the loop to make a knot.

Snip. Take the pins out. And then I'll repress the hem.

And that's how you hem trousers.