Work Pants
A-*hem*. Pants hemming tutorial specifically for heavy-duty work pants.
@riverhyssop, I borrowed the photo of your pants to start this tutorial. Rolling them up like this is an excellent way to judge how much you need to cut off. Roll them up, stand up straight to check that they’re a comfy length, make sure you got them both equal. Then, using chalk or a colored pencil or even a pen (because we’re not being fancy or professional, here!) mark right at the bottom where the fabric is folded. If you want, you can take them off to do this. In fact, take them off right now, because you need to cut them next.
Tools you need for hand-sewing this will be; good sewing scissors that can cope with heavy fabric, medium-sized needle, sturdy dark blue or gray thread (I’m just using pink for visibility in the photos) and a thimble. If you have to get rid of an old seam, a seamripper is useful, but for the pants shown above we won’t have to.
Turn your pants inside out and smooth the legs down flat. You’re going to cut them straight across, mark with a ruler if you need to, about 2cm or 3/4 inch LONGER than the chalk mark you made. I use my finger width. Then fold it over like so:
The fabric to the right is the inside of the pants leg. The finger-width is a good approximation of how wide a regular pants seam is. Our chalk mark is now inside that fold - so we don’t have to worry about it anymore! The reason we’re only folding once, instead of twice, is that the fabric is SO THICK. If you fold it twice, you would need an industrial-quality sewing machine to deal with the heavy layers.
Thread your needle and pull the thread through until the ends are even. We’re going to be sewing with double thread for extra toughness. REady? Go!
As a right-hander, I’m going to hold the fabric with my left hand and stitch from right to left like so. We want a row of stitches that look like rungs of a ladder, and hold the raw edge of the fabric to keep it from fraying.
Like this! I went ahead and drew a (pink) line on the fabric to keep myself straight. Each stitch starts on the single part of the fabric and comes back up on the double part. If it’s hard to push through, especially near a seam, use the thimble. Thimbles let you push the end of the needle hard without hurting your finger.
If you have a machine, you can do this same technique with the zig-zag stitch. Here’s what that looks like:
I went around it twice with the zigzag stitch and it has held up for quite a while. You can see the bulkiness of the long seam of the leg, here; that’s the reason we’re working with a single fold.
I hope this helps! Feel free to send a question if any part is unclear. I’ve done this a lot of times, and find it much easier than any other method I’ve tried!
