Once upon a time, I bought a dress at Target. This dress was really long, so I swung by my neighborhood dry cleaners to get it hemmed. They charged me $18 for this service. I was livid.
This incident was my sister’s inspiration for the best birthday gift I’ve ever gotten– my very own sewing machine. Now I can hem my own dresses whenever I want!
But you know what sucks? When you make an amazing dress or curtains and it has an unattractive hem line running along the bottom of the fabric. Fortunately, you can avoid this using the blind hem stitch.
(Apologies for the poor picture quality. I need a better camera and am also a bit hungover…a lot hungover, actually…)
A blind hem is helpful when you have fabric with a complicated pattern and it’s impossible to find just one color to match, or when you have a really nice garment where you just don’t want the hem line to show.
I ended up using the blind hem and shirring to make this awesome sundress yesterday morning before work:
So how does it work? It’s way easier than it looks!
First, turn under your hem (twice asssuming you don’t have a serger) and iron in place. Baste the hem (sew straight with a very long stitch length. My normal stitch length is 2.5 cm, so I lengthened it to 5 cm for basting) about 3/16-1/4″ from the edge of the fabric. That is, leave about 1/4″ of space between the inner edge of the hem and the wrong side of the fabric. Use a thread color that will be highly visible. Don’t worry about it not matching the fabric. You’re going to rip this stitch out at the end anyway.
With the fabric positioned like it is in the picture above, flip the hem right, toward the front side of the garment. The wrong side of your garment should now look like this:
The “back of hem” section is the 1/4″ space between the edge of the hem and the basting stitch. If you flip the garment over, the front side of the garment should look like this:
The 1/4″ section on the very left in the picture above is the other side of the same part you see when you flip the fabric over to the wrong side of the garment. Does that make sense? The hardest part of this stitch just getting oriented, so it should be simple from here on out.
Switch the presser foot on your machine to one specifically designed for a blind hem stitch. Mine is a bit wider than the normal presser foot and has a little blade/guide thing sticking out of the bottom.
My blind hem stitch is stitch 09
Place the edge of the guide directly on the seam between the back side of the hem and the wrong side of the fabric. Choose the blind hem stitch setting on your machine. Lower your presser foot and your needle.
Once your start sewing, the needle is going to switch between sewing on the left hand side (wrong side of fabric) and right hand side (back of hem) of the guide. The needle will spend most of it’s time on right hand side, and jump over to the left hand side to make a little notch/triangle every few stitches. The needle should just slightly catch the fabric on the left side of the fold. Adjusting the stitch width will make the needle catch more or less of the fold. Check your sewing manual for details.
Once you finish this step, the inside of your garment will look like this:
sorry this is blurry!
You can rip out the basting stitch you did earlier (that’s the straight stitch on top).
Now you’re done! The inside of your garment will look like so:
the hem as viewed from the wrong side of the dress
And the outside of the garment should have some discrete tiny stitches that are barely visible:
Congrats! You are now master of the blind hem stitch.
I was going to do a tutorial for the shirring, but it’s so easy it might not be worth it. I used a 3.5 cm length straight stitch with black thread on top and elastic thread in the bobbin. I drew a chalk line on the fabric for the first line of shirring, but used the presser foot as a guide to keep the distance between my shirred lines an even 5/8″ wide. Remember to back stitch at the beginning and end of each line. I shirred about 5 lines on the top of the dress, left a gap for my boobs and then shirred another 5 or 6 lines for the waist. You can read more about shirring fabric here.
Happy sewing!
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Wow, I’m impressed!! Super cute.
very helpful I must say for those of us who are somewhat sewing deficient. I’ll show this to my fiance–he’s the one who knows how to work the sewing machine–I can handsew if that counts for something.
I love your blog. Thank you for all of your awesome sewing tips! You really make it less frightening to try new stitches!
Thanks! To be honest I never know what I’m doing, so I try to break things down so that they’re accessible for normal people
Thanks so much! I’m a self-taught sewer, so I learn by trial-and-error, and by awesome tutorials like yours! This was very helpful!
thank you.
because i own a sewing machine i was tasked with hemming my great aunt’s dress for her granddaughter’s wedding.
because it was for her i wanted to really do a nice job
because of your tutorial she loved the finished product.
thank you.
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