Creative & Culture

How To Sew A Hem

You won't have to hem by hand anymore once you've seen this tutorial. In three and a half mere minutes, your instructor describes and demonstrates how to use a sewing machine to create two hem types: straight, and curved. Enlarge

How To Sew A Hem

You won't have to hem by hand anymore once you've seen this tutorial. In three and a half mere minutes, your instructor describes and demonstrates how to use a sewing machine to create two hem types: straight, and curved.

Hi. My name is Roz, and I'm the owner of Sew Much Fun. I have been sewing since the age of six.

It was my best subject at school, and I followed through and studied at London College of Fashion. I have now had at least thirty years experience in the clothing industry, and I've now decided to open my own shop, to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for sewing, and all my designs. I'm going to show you how to hem an edge of a fabric using a sewing machine, and there are two main ways of doing this.

The first way I'm going to show you is called a double-folded hem. So we're going to fold up a narrow piece, and then we're going to fold up a deep piece. And then we're going to sew, with the sewing machine, using straight stitch, along this folded edge.

So again, I line up my machine with that folded edge, on the wrong side of the fabric. I'm going to stitch number one. We're going to stitch forwards and backwards to secure, and then I'm going to sew, nice and evenly, all along that edge.

Now, this is the kind of hem I can do on the machine on a garment that has a very nice straight hem. But if I had something with a curve on it, I need to do a slightly different type of hem. And to do that, I want to zigzag the raw edge first, so I'm going to do that on this side of my sample.

So first, I'm going to use stitch number two, and I'm going to just zigzag nice and neatly with the raw of my edge going into the inside of my toe of my foot, there. So this neatens up my raw edge to begin with, and then I'm just going to turn this up very, very narrowly, and this is called a pin hem, so I can do this kind of hem on a very, very flared skirt. Again, I'm going to go on to stitch number one, and again from the wrong side of the fabric, I'm going to do a nice straight edge.

Now, I am using a green thread so you people can see what I'm actually doing, but obviously, if I was doing this on a dress, I would use a matching colored thread. And now we have a nice, neat hem on the bottom of my flared skirt. So that's two basic hems, on the sewing machine. .