Three things to avoid when adding a hem to jeans

Or, 'When Thing Don't Work Out'

Yep, I've gone back to have another go at those pretty turn up hems that I talked about at the beginning of the month.  Last time, things didn't work out exactly as planned so armed with some new ideas I thought I'd revisit the idea.  Bad move.

I decided I wanted to not waste all that pretty material that I'd used last time.  So I painstakingly unpicked it all so that I could reuse it, then I came up with a plan to re-sew the hems but this time with a split in them, to allow for fat calves (ie: mine) to fit through them.

The plan was good and it worked pretty well I thought.  I managed to get a nice neat looking split and I even got a nice contrasting colour top-stitch going on which I think is quite fetching.

So it's all good right?  I re-used the pretty material and the hems worked out well?
Unfortunately, no.  The split works fine, but the small area above the split is as tight as ever.

Re-using the material was mistake number one.  Thinking about it, these jeans have a bit of stretch in them and the material I used doesn't.  What's worse is I used some interfacing to line the material.  A good plan for making it a little stronger for it's coming life as my new hem but a bad plan on the making it stretchy front.

Then there's the fact that I just didn't cut these jeans off in the right place.  That non-stretchy hemline is right on the fat part of my calf.  Not flattering and not practical it seems.  So there's mistake number two. I would have cut them longer but by the time I got around to tackling these hems a little part of the knee area had worn through too and so I was trying to solve two problems at once.

Well, that obviously didn't go to plan but I wasn't too daunted yet as I still had my second pair of jean victims lined up for the pretty hem treatment.  For these ones I made the cut lower down, to avoid the fat calf problem.  I didn't use stretchy material but these jeans weren't stretchy and what's more they are a wider fit so I was reasonably confident that they would still be ok.

I picked out these pretty raindrops to use and I started with my third attempt.  You might be able to see from the photos but I didn't even get this attempt finished.  So what went wrong this time?

This time the jeans were just too darn baggy!  These were jeans that had quite a flare on them, that's why I didn't think they would be too tight, my thought had been that I would be cutting most of the flared part away so the turn up would just rest nice and loosely on the lower part of my leg.  Wrong!  Nope, even with a chunk cut off the bottom, these turn ups looked ridiculously flared out, only worse because it was in the middle of my calf.  That my friends, was mistake number three.

So I exited the sewing room in a fit of pique and although I've probably learnt enough to ensure I could make a decent pair of cute turn up hem jeans at some point in the future, right here and now I am pretty much done with that idea.

It's a shame as I do still want the end product but at the minute I'm out of victims to experiment on, so a natural break is called for and that's probably no bad thing!

S x

♥