Shortening Jeans - 17 January 2025

This pair of jeans just needed to be around 1.5 cm shorter at the hem. My friend tried them on wearing her normal trainers to test the correct length. She’d already washed them once and as you can see they came with a raw hem which has already frayed quite a bit only after the first wash.

I offered to shorten them as I’d shortened some work trousers recently here. The method this time was different because the jeans came with an unfinished hem and we wanted to keep them just like that. The plan was to just make a line of stitching at 1.5 cm from the uneven edge and cut just below that stitching.

I was very happy to finally be able to choose from my special box of threads that I bought back in August and that I wrote about in this post.

As you can see the selection includes two shiny lurex threads and even black and white shirring elastic. I will be able to use up this selection little by little - I like how tidy it all looks in the box.

We decided that the colour above was the best to blend in a bit and not to attract too much attention.

The denim actually frayed a lot. Above you can see an overlocked side seam as sewn in the factory. I think the jeans are designed to fray.

It was not hard to do the line of stitching because it was just one layer of fabric. Only one seam was really tough but with my new sharp needle it was no problem to sew. I used this sewing stitch rather than plain stitch :

I’m not sure what this stitch is called but I’ve seen it used in stretchy materials and I’ve used it in the bag I’m making here and here.

I then just cut about 2mm below the stitched line carefully with my best scissors.

It looks neat at the moment but we expect that the hem will continue to fray a bit.

Thank you for reading !