Easy on the inseam!

I am a fairly short person, about 175cm (5’8″) if I’m lucky. My family is short. We are a vertically challenged, stocky, German peasant sort of people. My wife is also short so, unless we get a genetic mutation, our offspring are likely to carry on being short. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Jockeys are always in demand, and the low center of gravity makes short people harder to knock over, particularly if they’re stocky. Which I am.

As vertically challenged people, it can be difficult to find pants that fit to length. Generally in Australia pants are bought on waist size only, unlike in the US where you can choose both waist and leg measurements. This has particularly been a problem for me recently when buying new jeans that are so long as to almost trip me up.

Buying my last pair of jeans was an adventure in itself – at least for the store assistants pictured above – since the last pair my size had to be removed from the mannequin.

Note Exhibit A: a pair of jeans flowing well past my heel, and half way around my foot. Flares may be making a comeback, but I think this is taking it a little too far. So what can be done? Dry-cleaners offer a hemming service, but $15-$20? I think not!

When we were married Kate’s mum gave us an old Singer sewing machine. It sat unused until recently, when I decided something had to be done once and for all about my jean predicament. Note that since about the age of 14 while living at home I had to wash and iron my own clothes, as well as sew my own buttons back on. Yes, a modern day Oliver Twist, if you will.

And so I searched hither and dither on the internet for instructions on how to hem jeans. I seemed to have hit the jackpot at one forum where they talked of the hem tutorial to end all hem tutorials. But, alas, they noted the link had been taken down, and so the search continued.

Never fear, Fig and Plum referenced the very same tutorial (obviously it was a good one), but had also saved the Word document! (DaciaRay.com also created a tutorial with pictures although the following tutorial is the one I used. And so, here, I present to you the document “Hemming Jeans Like a Pro”. You can also get it as a PDF if you prefer, although the file size is much bigger.

Hemming Jeans Like a Pro.doc (0.2mb)
Hemming Jeans Like a Pro.pdf (2.1mb)

And so, having followed the instructions as best I could, you can see the results for yourselves.

Exhibit B: hemmed jeans, well-hemmed, if I say so myself.

Return next week for Home Economics 101, as I present to you, cooking with Dave. Or more accurately, cooking with Kate, with pictures and taste-testing by Dave.