All You Need to Know About Skirt Hems

1. April Skirt Hem Intro V2: April Jackson here as your teacher. In this next module, we're going to attack skirt hams. Anyone who has worn a skirt or works with good hands will know that they come in a variety of finishes for everyone. You can have simple hams that where we cut and we turn under New, do a basic gene ham. Some we surge and we top stitch. There are others with knit fabrics where we're going to use our cover stitch. Then we move into the element of line skirts where we have lining attached, end-user blind hammer, and even into formal wear, where we are going to tackle a formal dresses which tend to have a fuller skirt with multiple layers. And a lot of times, we have to just make sure that the finished skirt is totally parallel when the client is wearing them. So here we go. 2. Lesson 1: Lined Straight Skirt: There are many variations to skirt hams. This dress we have today, I would consider its straight. There's no vent, but it is lined. And when we do a blind hem on it. So I want to walk you through the steps that we're going to use to perform this alteration. So let's look at what we have pinned. Our client came in and we pin this on her. You can see these are the pins holding up the ham. Let's see how much we have flipped inside 3.5 at this 0.3 inches. I never worry when there's a little bit of a variation with that, it looks nice on the client. My main concern is that when we do this ham, it's the same all the way around. If I had to choose, I will always choose the little bit longer, which would be the three inches. So I'm going to go with a three inches overall hamming of this skirt. Let's take those out. This lining, you can see is loose and not attached to our dress at all. What I'm going to do just with this because it's like that is I'm going to get it prepped first. If we need to have the dress three inches overall, we are going to hand the lining three inches overall. I'm just laying that out nice and straight there. Perfect. And I'm going to put a, this is our finished line. But this has a rate now this is almost like a quarter-inch top stitch. I like doing a half-inch top stitch. So if that's our finished line, we're actually going to cut one inch below. Go to the other side three inches. That's your finished. That's where we're actually going to cut a longer ruler to connect those dots. Here we go. Nice straight. The ham seems to be flopping down anyways here. So I, my main concern and it's lying flat on the grain. And when I connect my lines that my ham is nice and straight. So I am going to just connect, I choose sides. And that is the line I'm going to cut on to make sure it doesn't move on me. I'll put a couple of pins in here. I'm just going to cut straight across. The lining is prepped. And we'll take that to the straight stitch machine after we do our outer material. So now I'm going to lay down the rest of the dress. I want the front side up. Enrico. Sure. I'm going to check before you do a lot of fussing. This is my finished line. They have inch and a half on the inside. If I'm going to cut inch and a half, It's kinda running right along my old ham. So I'm going to want to get rid of that old ham. So it's not in my way, It's hard to see, but that is a blind him. We don't see it. So I'm just going to cut my thread. And, um, blindly looking for that. Let's see. I get that pulled out. There it is. If for some reason you can't find it, you can see that because this is a really textured material. You've got all these fibers. I'm just kind of cutting underneath and hoping I catch the right thread. If for some reason you absolutely can't find it, instead of playing with it all day. You can use a razor blade to take that out. Sometimes that is a little easier, but sometimes I just don't know when to give up. Today's that day. Let's grab a razor blade. And at that point we'll just run the blade underneath. That seems to be working better. In this tray time is money, so don't let your pride get caught in there. Like I do. Doesn't take much the blade it because it's only a blind him anyways, so we're only cutting a few threads. Once I get this out, I want to show you something on this hand that I'm noticing that I wanted to make sure ours is not like this. Okay. We're all the way around. I'm noticing, remember when I initially measured how much is flipped inside and so that was inch and a half. Over here. There's almost a quarter inch difference. That's well, that's almost even a little bit more. It's almost one inch and 1 eighth. Then over here it might be inch and a half. Again. Our primary goal, whenever we do a ham like this, whatever is flipped inside, we want it to be perfectly parallel. We don't want to have that much of a variance in our ham. It just makes it look like something is crooked. So when we cut ours and we put our hands up, if it's going to be inch and a half, it's going to be inch and a half all the way around. We don't want to mimic another app, a poor job because then our job will just be poor. So back to putting this dress with the front up. Nice and straight. Three inches is our finished line. And we're going to cut it an inch and a half. I'm going to mark it in the middle. Three inches since our finished and cut at inch and a half. And the same over here. I'm going to select both of those. This material is a little harder to see, but not impossible as long as you have a sharp chalk. Me for I move this, I'm going to put a pin through my finished ham. This is where the new hams going to be right through to the other side. So it holds the two layers. And here and here. Doing that for two reasons. The first reason is when I pull out their old ham now, to cut that, I don't want these lines to slip rate now, so that's going to hold that in place for me. Now. I can cut, I don't have to draw. There's no sense in drawing this cut line all the way around. It's just a waste of time. We're just going to cut through the two layers. There we go. Now, those pins are also holding my two layers together. So my finished line on the back, I already have where it's going to go, so I'm just going to connect the pins. I can take those out. Now. Our first stop is going to be the straight stitch machine, where we're going to put the ham into our lighting. At the straight stitch machine where we're going to put the hammer into our lining. Let's pull that out so we can see it. And we do want to start our stitching on the backseat of the lining. Once again, it's all inside. It's one of those things that won't make or break your job. But it's just a good practice to start and have all your overlapping on the vaccine. So with the lining it's inside out. I can see this is the zipper. So I know this is my vaccine. Of course, because I can see the lining. This is the inside seam. I know that I'm going to be rolling it towards the wrong side so that when all is said and done, we have a nice clean finish on the good side of our lining. Just a half-inch, half-inch. So we're going to fold it half inch. Half inch. That I don't usually mark that. Take the extra time. We're just going to do the work. Half-inch, half-inch, fold it in. Make sure you're happy with the way this looks. Needle in. And we can see that's a nice clean finish there. Continue that around. I have because it's aligning two things. I am definitely making sure I am putting my tension on the front and the back while I'm sewing. Otherwise, it may tend to pucker because the lining is a bit more delicate. Even though the machine is pulling. I'm at least keeping this flat so that we have a nice clean finish on the good side. Needle in reposition. Half-inch, half-inch. We want to make sure too, that when we're doing this, we're not pulling the top. Because then that's when we get that pucker. And we may get off centered and we get a role. Just flip it in perpendicular to the siem. Hold that in place. The machine do the work and you just hold the material. You can see here we're actually didn't pull. When I did this. See this area. Can you see how it kinda went a little wavy. It's one thing we'd like to try and avoid. So I'm going to be a good girl and make sure I'm pulling the front and the back, but it just kinda shows you one of the reasons why we do that. Normally do that. It gives a nice flat finish. Make sure my side seams are lined up. Turned under. This is where we began. You can see my scenes lifting up there. So I'm going to correct that if the lining wasn't cut perfectly on the straight grain up and down, then when we cut it across, it can cause it to not fold as neatly as we'd like. So we may have to coax that down. Let's go over that again and make that a little neater. Overlap. In a secure your stitches down. You're lining is done. We'll give it a final press. Once we've been to the the blind hammer. At this point, we are going back to the iron though. Whenever we do, actually we've got a surge this first. Then we're gonna go back to the iron. Whenever we have a skirt hem, we always want to make sure that it is actually pressed up into place before we blind him. So let's go to the surgery to finish off this edge. The surgery we're going to finish off the bottom of our outer material. Of course, we just want to make sure our lining is out of the way. We want the good side of the material up facing us that will always make sure that the goods side of the surging will be visible when we put our Hamon. And of course, when we're approaching seams, seams are already pressed to the back. We want to make sure we keep them going in the direction that they're supposed to be. We approach that makes sure that lying flat. And we only need to shave off the egg. We're just given a clean finished to the raw edge because you can see, of course it's fraying and we don't want that. Not going to give me a nod. Yeah, it's a nice clean finish. Approaching my next scene. The vaccine was pressed to open, so I want to keep it that way too. We're at where we began overlap and then not. Now what we need to do is we need to go to the iron and press this into place. Skirt hem, especially for blind hemming, we will generally press up into place. If we look at our work here, remember, we had left inch and a half on the inside. My main objective is I want this to be a nice parallel line from my search dead to my finished edge. Though I'm going by my line that I have on with chalk. I am more concerned to have a nice parallel clean finish on the inside. If this wavers like 1 eighth or 1 16th of an inch, it's not going to make a difference in the finished product, which is gonna look neater when this is nice and straight, as opposed to the way it was when I had gotten the dress. This much was up in this much was down. Even if it was even on the outside. It just looks like there's a problem on the inside. That little bit there. Do another a little bit using my line as a guideline. But visually, I'm just looking to make sure it looks nice and parallel to me. That's in place. Here we go. You can see using the clapper helps to set that. If I was to move that before using the clapper, the we wouldn't have as crisp of a line, the steam would still be too hot in the crease we prestin will lift up. We are giving it a good final press ones. We blind him. But this just helps us with accuracy when we're putting it into the blind hammer. And we can at this point if you want, let's pull our lining out and give it a good Press while we're here. You can do it now or you can do it later, but I'm here now and I feel like doing it now, so we'll do that on the good side. I'm just giving it a press and you see how that looks much nicer once we press it, if we were as opposed to leaving it like that, even from the good side, it's giving a nice press to finish it. That way when we come back to the iron, we don't have to do this step. See how clean that looks. And this is what it looks like on the good side of the lining. Now, let's go to the blind hammer and finish off this job. At the blind hammer to finish off the outer part of the dress. Take your lining and just push it up out of the way. We do want to try and start our blind him on the back. So I have the back of the dress facing up. I know that in my flip this up, this is my center back seam. Once again, it doesn't make a big difference if you started here or over here, but it's just a good practice. I'm using a gray so you can see, but with this material, gray would be a suitable color because it wouldn't show on the other side either. Got that underneath. I've got my little piece of metal here running along my surgeon. Let's do a couple of stitches and see what we've got going on here. I'm sure that's going to. Now, one thing I want you to take notice of, this material has a real kind of a looser. We've, if you take a look at the grain, you can see how it's kinda pulling this way. To me, the lines are going this way. This is going straight. When we do this, we're going to want to kinda coax this bottom part with our hand to make sure the grain stay straight. Otherwise, this is one of those jobs where it's going to shift for sure. And then you're gonna get a pucker and one edge or it's going to get those little twisty lines that we don't want. We find when we do a skirt because it's a longer distance, you have the friction of the bottoms pushing this one way, but this is getting pushed down. Friction coming this way. It can get unaligned. So with skirts especially we want to kind of give it a bit of a coax with her hand, make sure the seams stay lined up. When we do that. Let's take a look and see. You can see how nice that is turning out. Can't even see the stitches and it's invisible on that side. We want to make sure we're coaxing our material just a little. I love materials like this that have such a texture to it because you're finished seam will be totally invisible. We're now approaching where we began. So we're just going to make sure we overlap that a little bit about a couple of inches. Remove our needle out of the material, find our little loop there she is. Let's cut that loop. So let everything is locked. Now all we need to do is go to the press table, give that a final press. And at this point, our project is complete. We want to give our outer material a final press. You can see even right here it looks okay. But see how it's just a little wavy That's from going through the machine. I'm going to actually just do a single layer, put it on my board like this, helps us smooth out the fibers. And one more just to connect all that. And at this point, you're alteration is complete. You can see what a nice finish we have on the bottom. Nothing shows the nice clean finish on our lining. And of course the lining doesn't show. There. We have our dress alteration. This has been hemmed. 3. Lesson 2: Skirt Hem Quarter Inch Topstitch: We're going to work on another skirt hem today, our client is brought in this dress. And what's the benefit of this type of ham? We're actually just going to search it, then just do a quarter-inch top stitch is because sometimes your material is too flimsy cutoff grain that in order to do a double role, you're just not going to get a nice enough looking ham. So sometimes it's just simpler to search it and do a top stitch. Sometimes this works also with knits. It's a good technique to use. Just use it once in a while. If you're fighting with a double-barreled home, maybe you just might want to surge it, do the top stitch and you'll still get a good clean finished. So let's look at what we're working on. Of course, our client came in and I used my skirt marker. This way I want to make sure that while she's wearing this gown, we've got a perfectly parallel ham on her. So this is exactly where I want my finished him to be when all is said and done. You can see even here, the Lavie is a bit of a contrasting stitch. And they did the same technique where they searched and then just flipped it up. On this particular dress. They actually did their top stitching very close to the edge. So that's almost like a 1 eighth or 1 16th. You could do the same. Or you can even just like I said, bring your stitching a little bit higher to the quarter-inch and it will still look very nice. But one of our objectives, of course, with a dress like this, is making sure that we match our thread to the garment. I can see here where they did not still in, it's not bad. But they still probably could have chosen a better color. Of course, I'm going to use contrasting for you to see, but just keep in mind in order to have a nice clean finish. Try and match up your color as best as possible with for your top stitching. The first stopper going with this address is rate to the surgery. Generally when we're at the searcher, one of our guidelines is we will have the edge of the foot running along our stitching or sometimes our chalk line. But we don't necessarily want that with this alteration because that's going to leave seam allowance inside of about five-eighths of an inch and that's gonna be too much for us. You can see here, even on their work, that they just have like a little quarter-inch flipped under so we don't want to leave much more than that. So what I'm gonna do is I'm of course I'm starting at the back. This is my back. I'm going to work my way up to my line. So as you can see, if I let the line where I want to do my fold run along here, I'm gonna do it for that. So you can see that's too, too much for on the inside. Let's see if we can see that. That's about five-eighths of an inch and it's a little too wide. We wanted to turn that down a little bit more. So what I'm going to do, you'll notice on your foot there are some other lines here. There's a little red line. And of course our other two, this little notch here runs exactly what your needle. I'm going to run my finished him along with that little red line. Now once again, keep in mind, it's not going to make or break anything. If it happens the veer by an eighth of an inch, but it's just a good guideline there. Now we can see how we have a nice quarter-inch that will flip under beautifully. Okay, let's just continue around. Like we always do. Make sure if your seam allowances on the inside are folded open, Let's make sure they stay that way. Thea with your hand. So I'm visually taking my chalk marks and making sure they line up with that little red line. The seam is flat. Now we're going to finish off where we started and pull that out. We have a nice clean search all the way round. And at this point we're going to go to the straight stitch and do our final step of sewing, which is just putting in that nice little a top stitch, straight stitch. Of course, whenever we do any type of top stitching, if we want our overlap to be on the vaccine. So I have the back of my dress on my table and I'm following that same all the way down to the ham. So this is my vaccine. With the dress inside out. We're just going to flip that little searching we just did in length that like I mentioned, we could easily do a quarter-inch top stitch. I'm gonna do one quickly just so you can see. We're folding in our surged area. Probably a little bit more than one-quarter of an inch. And how I know that is right now, my fold of the bottom of the dress is radon. My quarter-inch line on my machine guide, and my needle is over is actually insides that searching. So that's how I have this flipped up that I would say that's almost one centimeter or half an inch there. But no more than a half an inch. Just I think a centimeter is a little bit less than that, So I would even go with that. And I'm running my folder, my material right along the quarter inch. I just wanted to show you what I want to show you what that looks like on this side because I might go with the 1 eighth top stitch myself. But I just wanted to show you that you could do either one. That's what it looks like on the good side. That still is totally preventable. But I think for this dress, because they had the narrower AI top stitching, I want to replace that too. So I'm just going to take out this bit that I showed you and then we're just going to put the skinnier. Either one will work with what we've searched and cut off already. We go Let's take oh, that's gone. Flip our dress backup, the ham. I can see my little white line anyways that I had originally. And I'm going to put a skinnier. So I have that flipped up just a little bit more than quarter of an inch. The main concern is not exactly the number. It's the main concern is that when even from the inside your work looks neat. So as long as this looks parallel, it wouldn't even matter if you decided to flip it up this much. As long as you did that all the way around. Okay. That they're going to start my stitching. And for me to do the narrower top stitching, I am running the folds of my fabric along the edge of the feed dog here. Just pick a spot and then keep it lined up with that. Your goal is always that from the inside and the outside your work looks parallel. Let's see what this is looking like. There we go. See that's looking really nice. Back to my regular stitch. Fold this, unfolding it now I can see on my white line. But once again, what's more concerning to me if this varies off by like an eighth of an inch or 16th of an inch, it's not going to make a difference in the finished him. I want this to look parallel through needle in, readjust your material unfolding at all my line and I think that looks parallel, so let's keep going. The same at the scene. Let the machine do the work. You're just holding the material. Almost all around. There you go. Overlap our original stitching where we started. Just a little. Reinforce it a bit. And do keep in mind that I am using contrasting thread, everything will look much better when you use the matching thread. We go clean up any loose threads and let's take a look. See how nice that looks. Which is that little bit flipped underneath. Let's go to the press table and we'll see how nice this looks after our final press. We can see that even though this ditching, it looks very nice. Everything seems to be curling. That's where our final press will lay everything into place. Use our clapper to flatten it out. Just keep going around your skirt. I'm pulling on this just a little bit, putting a little tension just to smooth everything out. Let's take a look at our finished product. There you go. That's how I want the where's the front of this dress? There we go. That is our finished skirt hem. I'm sure you also noticed how this can be a little bit quicker of a technique. It's another benefit of doing your skirt hem in this manner, but it still gives a nice clean finished to any garment. 4. Lesson 3: Shorten Pleated Skirt from Waist: We have another skirt that our client would like to have hemmed. It is pleaded and it actually is double-layered. It's another skirt where we're going to choose to do the hamming from the waist band. It is a little trickier because we have two layers to work with. But I'm going to walk you through the steps once we've got the two layers based it together, it's just like the other skirt we did. So let's start at the beginning. We're going to look at our skirt here. You can see it's fairly full. We have our two layers are pleaded layer over top and we have a knit lining underneath. I want to show you inside out. Our net lining. When the waist band is stretched out, our lining is actually smooth. There's no extra pleats and that we're that's important is when we're basing our pleaded material to the lining, this is going to remain flat, but we just want to make sure that our pleaded material is straight up and down. You'll see how that will work in when we do that. We do have another label at the back. We'll want to make sure that that goes back to our client to Canada. Find the back easily. Plus this particular skirt does have skirt hangers. And if it comes through skirt hangers, this makes it easy to hang on a hanger in your closet. I am also going to replace though. So at this point, the first things to go will be the skirt hangers. Take those off. And I'm going to remove the label for us this way. We'll just set them aside and we'll put them back on the skirt when this project is done. Yeah. There we go. We'll set those aside. At this point. I want to put this back right side out. And I'm going to use my chalk to mark certain points I want. That's the back and there should be a sightseeing. Let me get my bearings here. That was the vaccine. So with our back seam, I want to, I'm putting a chalk mark on the waist band so I could easily determined. And we're having this actually total of two inches just so you know, I'm going to continue that chalk mark down into the skirt just so I know they line up there. My side seam I'm using the side seam of the skirt to determine that goes here. Let's draw that down also. And if there's one site seeing, there's usually another. There's the other side, same mark, the waist band. And I'm going to continue that straight down. And when it's lying on the side seems the only other see my need is the center. And I can determine that if this is the back, this must be the center of the front. And there you go. I have some marks. Now, what I need to do, I need to draw a line two inches below, or this seam is, this is where the waist band joins the skirt. I need to draw a line like this because I need a guideline. I need to go to the straight stitch machine in based this netting in its pleats. You can see even here, when it's joint, it's in its pleats, but it's kind of half gathered. I need to do the same and based it onto the lining, but I need a line to go buy. This is my two inch mark. That over. There we go. I'm continuing to mark two inches from the old way spans. Seem there we go. Now I have something to work with. At this point, we're going to go to the straight stitch machine. I will use a light color to base this for two reasons. One, so you can see I'll use a bigger stitch that it'll come out. But also this way, I can take out my basting if any of it's gonna show after. I can always pull it out. So let's go to the straight stitch machine and base these two layers together. I've turned my dress inside-out. When doing this basting stitch, it doesn't really matter where you start. Whether you start in the middle of a panel or add a CME. My main concern is when I'm basing the two layers together, my lining, I will want to be fairly flat, no puckers. The first thing I wanna do then is get this under the machine. And I'm going to base rate on the line I drew, I have a bigger stitch this way it's easy to get out. I want my pleats to be straight up and down. If they start shifting. You'll notice that in the end, it will look very sloppy. Underneath. I see how that's smooth. I'm able to smooth that out without having to even really pull my waist band because I'm down far enough. I want my lining to be smooth. And then just make sure your pleats are straight up and down, 90 degree angle from the waist band. And let's just run some stitching and see how this goes. Needle in. Adjust my material. My lining is smooth. Okay. Just my pleats material up and down. I'm holding it here so it's not getting pulled. Putting a little tautness intention into it. Of course it doesn't have to be perfect because remember it's also gathered at the top there. Needle in. Flip that around. Just your material. Keep in mind this is a more advanced technique. It's not that it's impossible, it's just a bit more tricky. Because like I'm brushing hair almost just making sure everything's nice and smooth. If for some reason your foot, when you get caught underneath one of the bleach, just stop, kinda reposition, get it out and continue because you might have a fold and it might just catch once in a while. You just want to keep it flat. Flat style. You can see this is part of what we've already stitched. It's coming along nice. See, there's a little pucker there. That's not a problem at all. I'll show you how we're going to eliminate that little bit there. You might get the odd one, but it's, it's nominal. It won't even you won't even notice it afterwards. I'll show you how we're going to deal with that. Keep it flat. All right. We've already made it around to the other side. Take a quick look. There we go. Remember I said there was a couple of teeny little puckers. I could totally leave those in there and put this waist band back on and it wouldn't make a difference at all in the end. But I do want to show you how we would fix that. You just put that there and there. And your pleats are going to open up a little bit. Undo that, just smooth that back out and we'll go back over that. It's always easier just to fix little ones as in one area than do the whole thing. So you can see where my stitching came out. I'm just going to resell that. Just the rebased it. There we go. In aereo. We fix that one little pucker. Now we're ready to go to our next step. We're gonna go walk to the press table if you want it, you call was could do this while you're sitting. We're going to remove the waist band from the main material now. And then we're going to trim and get it ready to sew back together. But let's go up to the press table so it's easier to see. We're at our prep table. We're going to use our nice sharp blade to remove the waist band from this skirt. This one has been straight stitched. As well as search. So there's a fair amount to get through this. So just be patient. With some projects. There's no easy way to get through some things. There's no tearing this one out or no magic sheets patients and the steady hand. Let's continue on this way. This is where I wish we had that interlocking stitch. We're almost there. All right. At this point we just want to pull out some of our threads that are stuck to her waist band. Remember the other piece we're actually cutting off so we don't have to beat as fussy with that. The waist band you'll notice also has an elastic inside, but there's stitching that is holding the two layers together and that is a good thing we want to make sure that stays together. If for any reason they didn't have that, we would want to go to the straight stitch and close that up on our own, but they will always have the majority of the time. That's so, so the elastic will stay in place. All right? At this point, now it's time to cut the piece off that we need. So I have it on my table like this because I want to make sure I don't cut anything. I'm not supposed to cut. And I'm going to trim just about a quarter of inch from my basting. I don't want to cut my basting because then it'll all come out. The, what I worked so hard to put together that around. You might notice that here I've brought this up a little. I'm my cut. My main concern is that I want to cut off two inches. I know my stitching was from the seam allowance. But if it's kinda wavered, I don't want to be cutting on a crooked line. I'm cutting two inches total off of the skirt itself. Because of it says a difficult I'm area to do. I just don't want to follow my line. If it's crooked, It's just there to base that that material in. There we go. It's like anything. If you draw a line and you can tell it's Crockett, don't so on it. So it's straight. And this is the piece we cut off two inches all the way around. Let me get rid of that. And now we're ready to get the waist band back on. I'm looking for my marks that we put on here earlier. So where's my side seams? That's my back. Alright. This is my side seam, That's my vaccine. And there's a piece of chalk in the front. Also. Grabbed her waist band. This particular one, it doesn't really matter. I still see the marks where my the back of my labor was. So since I have the skirt, the back good side facing me. This is the back of the waist band. It will go like this and it's right sides together. So I'm gonna put that there like that and put a pin in. I'm going to go round to one more quarter. I know that's my side seam. Find the coordinating site's theme, and that's my chalk mark. We put and pin that there. This one's gonna be a little fussier to put together. But where it's easier, It's fussier and that we have to stretch our waist band to accommodate all that. But you can see how when I pull that, it lines up nicely. What's also a bonus? We're actually going to solo this first using the straight stitch machine before we go to the surgery. That makes it a little easier to That's my mark from the center front line that up with the center front on my waist band. Put a pin through straight up and down. And our last mark, there's my mark and there's my mark. At this point, Let's go to the straight stitch machine and we're going to give this a so to secure the waist band to the outer material all the way around. Right along the base of the elastic that's inside here. Let's go. At the straight stitch machine. I do have a lighter color in the top. I just want you to be as clearly see where I'm stitching. If you look here, this is the waist band I have it on top are always going to have the waist band on top and the skirt material on the bottom whenever we put a waist band back. And you can see there's elastic inside. There's a row of stitching to hold elastic into place. And then there's a half inch seam allowance. We are going to stitch right here at the half inch seam allowance. When we put our waist band back on. Of course, we have to do some pulling and stretching of our material because it is elastic. And we have to stretch so that the elastic accommodate this extra material. So I'm starting at a pin which is 10, either the side seam or front or back. Leave your needle in. Let's give this a little poll because we only have to stretch it. Just so that this is smooth. At this point, I find where my pen is back here too far. What I might do is I'm going to pull this, it's flat. I'm going to pinch it halfway and hold it there. That way. It's not I'm not going as far as the distance line up my raw edges, flatten out my band. C and stitch on your half inch needle in. Stop and say I've got a half inch seam allowance. Needles in. I'm going to give this a little bit of a pull now to the rest of it. So it gets to the other quarter pin and other quarter part, line the raw edges up. Leave the needle in. And let's adjust that to the next one. Like I said, this is a big distance. I'm going to pinch it halfway. You can put a pin in there if you want it. But I'm just going to pinch it, holding it in, place. The needle in. And let's reposition and finish that little quarter off. At this point I'm pulling so it's flat. Getting my raw edges even flattening out the elastic if I don't see how their last it's pulling like that. We want to stretch out the elastic switch right flat needle in and reposition almost around. Straighten that up. Needle in and let's do our last quarter it up halfway. There we go. The raw edges or even straighten out or last exon, definitely pulling front and back. Let's get rid of that. Almost there. Overlap where we began. And to trimmer threads. Now at this point, we want to check and make sure everything got caught. If for any reason it didn't weaken, adjust that now. So let's take a look. This is our waist band where we had sown. Looks good so far. Good, good, good. Don't worry about that. That's why we put that in so we could take that out. That's just our basting still caught good. That looks good there. And there we caught that all the way around, so that's good. While we're here, we're going to put our label back on. So let's find the back. I have our label. We go. Actually I switched my thread out to black for that. There you go. To the wording is going the correct way. It's always a good thing. Little bit attacking on this side. And they're talking they're went right through their waist band. So I'm not concerned that ours is going right through either. This is where they had it originally, so that's where we're putting it. It'll make it easier when they're getting dressed to define it, which is the vaccine, are in there. And we're going to tack our skirt hangers also to the side seams. This way when we search this edge, it's going to get caught into the surging and be nice and clean. Let's folder will skirt hangers and half binder sightseeing. There's one there. Just put that there to get across. Here we go. I'm using a smaller stage two because it is a really small ribbon. We use too big of a stitch, it won't even catch it. And we'll put the other side. The other ribbon will go. Sometimes if I have a skirt and they don't have these end, but it's a really nice skirt. I'll add them myself. It's just a nice little gesture for your client. Helps keep their clothes looking good when they can hang them up properly. At this point, we're going to go to the surgery and we're going to clean up this edge. Where at their surgery to clean up this thread where we joined our waist band to the skirt. Remember it's always easier to sew inside a circle, so I've left the skirt inside-out. We have to stretch this, of course. And we want to make sure nothing's gonna get cut. Let's lift up our foot just to get this wedged underneath. Put the foot down and let it get caught a little bit. Make sure our lining is flat. And we want to put some tension front and back. Lining is flat. Tension front and back. So that's nice and straight. And see how that's cleaning that up beautifully. Make sure we don't cut the loops we just sold on. The needle is in always helps when the needles and if we're doing any pulling tension front and back. But we're still letting the machine do the work. We're just holding the front and the back tight. Needle in position. Our fabric linings flat. Let's pull. It looks flat. And this is flat. Titan or fabric. We're almost to the end. Nice and flat. Tighten and go. This point we're going to overlap and then pull it out. Let's flip this right side out. There we go. And at this point, your job is pretty much done. If there's any thread that is showing, Be sure to go and pick it out. But otherwise, you're complete. This is quite a difficult job that you got through. Make sure you do practice anything like this. Find more skirts because it is more complicated, but once you learn the steps, there's nothing to it. 5. Lesson 4: Extra Full Hem 1 8th Topstitch: We're going to be Hamming a very full dress today. This is actually a skirt, but it would be taken care of just the same we're doing. This could be a quarter-inch or a 1 eighth inch. It's it's sort of in-between. I want to express to you how important it is that your client does have their shoes on when they're doing that type of fitting, especially if it's going right to the floor. This client originally came in and this is where the chalk mark lay, that was the very bottom of the ham with her shoes. This is the difference. It makes him the ham. So that's why it's very important for your client to have the appropriate shoe on when you are marking their ham. You've seen the how we mark this in a previous video. So now I want to just show you how we're going to translate this chalk mark into our finished him. Like when we did the chalk on the client, I was able to show you that the chalk mark actually will go right through to your lining. That's going to help us when we go to the lining. And this will guarantee if we connect all these chalk marks are ham is gonna be perfectly parallel and correct for our client. That's why it's important also to make sure that when we do mark for our client, that the chalk marks are just maybe about four no more than six inches away from each other. That will help us to translate into a very even ham for them. There is no work that we do at the table right now we're gonna go directly to the machine and begin the sewing. We're at the machine now. What we need to do with our garment is we always want our stitching to be on the backside of your work. So this is the back of the skirt. I'm going to follow that seam all the way down to the mark I'm working with, which is our longest mark. And we're going to flip our material rate on our chalk mark. And we're going to start on the very back scene. Let's get that out of the machine. Also, we want to match up the same stitch length, typically with any type of work like this, It's more delicate. They do use a smaller stitch, so I'm using about a 2.5. We want to get this under the machine and we are folding rate on our chalk mark the material right in half. We want to do our row of stitching. First row of stitching is going to be, let me get that here, but we're going to stitch about an eighth of an inch away no more if you can get less perfect from that fold. And we're going to do that all the way around. Let's get started so you can see what this is looking like. Get our needle and always have your needle in when you're adjusting your work. Like I always say, this is very crucial. Because when you're going from this mark to this mark to this mark, if you were to just pull your materials straight like this, you can sort of see how the chalk marks are falling here. Because your skirt is cut in, some of them are, pieces are falling on the bias. It's going to Drake more. You need to make sure you're going rate on each of those chalk marks. So we're only going to go from that mark to that mark. Let's roll our material. So eighth of an inch from that him from the fault. Now let's go to the next mark. Tuck your material away and let's go to the next month. Can see, let's take a look at where my stitching is going. See how it's just the little tiny it's almost a 16th of an inch. An eighth of an inch is okay. But no more than an eighth of an inch. But if you can get smaller, It's even better away from that fold. Let's tuck this around again. Get to the next mark. We're going to keep doing that until we get all the way around. The skirt. Next mark, I can see it there fold right on top of that. Sometimes you May 2 guess yourself and think, well, this looks kind of wavy, but because we marked this honor client using the skirt marker, you so on. Each of these lines and connect the dots. Almost, I'd say ninety-five percent of the time. The other 5% could just be an extra fussy customer. You will always have a perfect tab. I'm still folding from one to the other. This process, depending on how much material you have in your skirt, could take about another five minutes or so. So I'm well, I'm going to continue doing this. We're going to skip to the next session section for you. So we finally made it to the very end. You can see how lags very tedious, so don't rush through it in another tip when you're trying to so really close to the edge. Don't do what I call over steer. When your material is under there, just hold the material and let the feed dogs move it. Try to get really close in. The more you overstep your material, the more you're going to get a wavering line. It's not going to be a nice clean line. Just let the machine do all the work. You hold it into place and let it pull your work nice and straight and you'll get a nice, clean straight line. Next, we have to actually trim this excess off. Now, this is another tedious us part. Just take your time. I want to give you a little bit of a visual of how that's going to go. It's not a quick process because we do not want to be cutting into the good material are actually cutting our actual stitching we just put in. You can do this at your machine, you can do this at the pressing table, whichever is easiest for you. I'd just like to do it at my machine. And we're going to cut up to our stitching, use a really good sharp pair of scissors. And I always flip my materials so that I have the excess ham to my left. And I want to make sure that even that little bit of a lip that I've created with that stitching is facing away from mice where I'm cutting. And I'm just going to trim really close to my row of stitching. You almost want it to be about an eighth of an inch. So that when it's done, you just have you've trimmed off most of that the excess and you just have a little bit of a lip. Do little bits at a time wherever it's most comfortable. So I've actually moved the work to my legs. I do have pants on today. I find the material doesn't shift around as much because the materials resting against the material on my pants. Just like when it was on top of the table. I'm still laying it the same way. It just makes my work lay a little flatter. This is just a technique I do. Not everyone does. There's like this, but I find it works for me. Just do another little bit, reposition your material and trim. If while you're doing this trimming, you happen to accidentally cut this fold. It's not the end of the world as long as you don't make a big cut because eventually this is going to get folded in one more time. So if there is a little snip in there, it's not going to show on the good side. It does happen. That's why we just want to take our time. This is another very tedious job. It can take about five, sometimes ten minutes. So I'm going to continue this end. We'll skip back to taping rate when we're ready to go back into the machine. But do take note that it is a slower process. You're not going to get this done in just two minutes. Now we're finally done cutting all the excess material off the bottom of the skirt. So I'm going to set that aside for now. And you can see we have this nice just one row of stitching so far, one little fold with a nice clean cut. At this point. Now we're going to start at the same spot we did originally the vaccine. And now that row of stitching in that fold makes it easier for us to do our good fold. The second and see how that will turn in nicely and makes a nice rolled him. Now we're going to do our second row of stitching that will roll in to about anywhere from a this is going looking more like a quarter of an inch. Our main goal is that whenever we start rolling in at the beginning, that it looks the same all the way around the skirt. So with this folding in at about a quarter-inch, That's what we want it to look like all the way around. If you're able to get this, fold it to a really tiny, tiny eighth of an inch. Some materials are finding that you can do that then as long as it looks the same all the way around. We're folding the sin. See how that's falling into place nicely. And we're going to go right in the middle of that, which because it's only a quarter of an inch, it's about an eighth of an inch from the top fooled and the bottom. Let me get a little bit more going so you can see what this is. Looking away. Don't worry about trying to fold way up here. You only have enough control still. Right here at where you're working. So right in the middle. A little bit more so we can see, once again, do not over steer. So now let's look on the good side and see what that's looking like. See if you can see that. Now we have another quarter-inch are actually an eighth of an inch just from the finished him. And our main objective is to make sure that that row of stitching, because it's our top stitching, it's the final stitching. Looks nice and neat and straight. Let's keep going. Do a little bit more. Roll it in. And so a little role. And so we see it looks nice and parallel, it looks good. So in a straight line and do another little bit. And we can see how that's looking nice and neat on our goods side. So we're going to continue this technique all the way around the skirt. Skirts gotten a little twisted here. We're approaching a C and C here. Sometimes when we get to wear the same hits a ham, we may have to sort of manipulate the material a little bit more. We'll see when we get there. The reason that is, is because sometimes the seam is on a straight grain. This one's not, it's actually on the bias. So that's why it tends to stretch a bit more. So when we're doing our flipping, it sometimes can be just a little bit more fuzzy to get into place. Just manipulated little bit. Even if it's not overly glamorous. On this side, there might be a little bump. I'm going over the excess. There's like a little nub here. So I just wanted to make sure that it went through smoothly. They get caught in the hole. But you can see how even if it's not overly glamorous on this side, it's still going to look nice and clean on the good side. Sometimes you just need to manipulate the material a little bit more to get over a scene. Because you also have the thickness of the seam allowance going under your ham. Another technique I use sometimes when I'm doing this type of him is you can see how if I, because the materialist cut on a bias grain so it's curving a bit more. If I were to just pull the top material, eventually, it could get sink. So I'm kind of with my hand just pulling the bottom the flat part and it's causing this the curl in just the right amount. Just helping keep it so we're not pulling the top too much, read it, making sure everything's falling into place. You don't have to do that all the way around, but you may find in some areas it helps to aid in a nice flat him. Now I want to talk about a little bit of something that I'm noticing here that you might be questioning that it's not an issue. Our original chalk marks, we can see where they are falling. As I'm sewing this. Sometimes. We'll see the chalk mark. Let me see if I can find one for you here. On the very edge. Sometimes the chalk mark may tend to be a little bit more inside my ham. I've sought, I've seen that a little bit further down here, see how the chalk mark is a little bit more rolled in. Sometimes you might actually see the chalk mark. It might even be just a little bit on the outside of the material. That variance is not going to make or break your hem. It actually is probably the difference of maybe a 16th of an inch. Either way. It's not worth stressing over. When we do the marking. This is just at the floor. So the fact that this little piece is here, yet, this, these bonds are a perfect, is not going to mean that this ham is going to be hanging. That's almost like a two sixteenths or three-sixteenths of an inch off the floor. Nothing like that is ever going to be noticed. It's going to look nice and straight all the way around. So don't worry or stress over if you see your chalk mark in different spots. Now fat chalk mark was anywhere like half-inch or more. Either way, you might have an issue. But because you can see it's all within this little area, that's not going to make a difference. Once again, we're getting to a siem, so I'm just making sure that's getting flipped in nice and neat and tidy. Going to give it a little bit of a full. Because what happens is because this material is fairly delicate. The material would almost make like a little bit of a ball and can get stuck in the needle hole. We just helped get that area smoothly past that. Even though the industrial machine you might not Brings at some things like that, can stop the machine. But even one little piece of thread in the wrong place can jam up the whole machine so you just want to be careful. I'm applying a little bit of tension with this hand and making sure the materials lying smooth with this one. Just letting my hands slide along with the speed of the feed dogs. When you are doing a job like this, always make sure you have lots of thread on your bobbin. The last thing you want is to be sewing around and around and find out that you ran out of thread after your first couple of inches of stitching are actually getting to where we began. So I'm going to trim that up. Sure. That's in place. And just blend in that stitching. Our outer material is now fully fully done. We have that nice rolled him all the way round. We will be going to the pressing table and I will always give that a nice press. Even if I was to steam a project like this eventually I would always give my finished hammer, press. It just evens out and flattens everything out a lot neater. At this point before we go up to the machine and do any pressing, we might as well start on our lining. This particular dress just has one lining. And what I like with the chalk line is that a lot of times we can see the chalk line rate through. It'll go through the first material and hit our lining. So this is actually where our outside of our good material will be finished. Lining is generally anywhere from half an inch to one inch shorter than the outer material. So what I like to do with my lining at this point, I'm going to cut directly on this line. This particular skirt just had a surge Tam. I'm not a big fan of just leaving a surge, Tim, I like to do like a little top stitch, a quarter-inch top stitch. So we're going to cut this right on this line. When we are ham is finished. You'll actually be a half inch shorter than the outer material. So let's get this cut first. Just connect all your dots. We're approaching the end of my process of trimming and the lining and I want to show something to you. You might notice that with our lining, this piece I cut off is about an inch and a quarter thick. When I'm connecting the dots where my chalk mark originally made, when I mark the skirt, that there are some areas that it's just very slim. The reason for that is that we cannot assume that any garment that comes from the manufacturer is perfectly parallel to the floor in the first place, let alone on your client. If I were to show you the piece that I cut off the outer material, you would notice the same thing. There are areas that are wider and then there's areas that are visibly much smaller. Lattice because when a garment is initially made, especially something like this, that the material is cut on the bias. You would normally make the garment lot the material sit. And then when you're marketed on your client, you always use the skirt markers so it's parallel to the floor. Because you can see in some areas, see how the material here, this is actually on a straight grain so it's not stretching. Yeah, we can go over to here. And you see how that stretches. That's because just over a matter of maybe 14 inches of the skirt, this is going to hang straighter because it's on a straight grain over here. The weight of the skirts going to pull it and it's going to drape longer. And that's why you get that uneven looking ham. The skirt marker will make it perfectly parallel to the floor and parallel when your client has it on the same markings on our lining. Obviously, when she had this skirt on. At this point, there was only a little bit that was needing shortening over here. There was a little bit more. It's just because it was not cut perfectly parallel from the factory. So it's always, it's more important that you cut on your chocolate because that's guaranteed to be I'm parallel to the floor. So always trust your chalk lines. Now that we've got this cut all the way round, we're going to find the back are vaccine. Let me see. There we are. I can see where my zipper was. Even though it's aligning. I still like to start on my boxing. And at this point we're just going to do a quarter-inch rolled hem, which if you remember from our pants and other items that we have worked on, we just fold the material under one-quarter inch. Folded under another quarter-inch. Put your needle into Hold it. This is a little bit stretch here of a material. So you want to take your time. Bullet under about a quarter-inch, quarter-inch. And the actual quarter-inch issue. Our objective is to make sure this just looks nice and parallel all the way around. We can see that the material is running along the quarter-inch line. But our main goal is just to make sure that you have a nice neat rolled him with this quarter-inch, quarter-inch all the way round. Our finished him on here will be up about a half an inch from the outside material. The main goal is that our lining will not be showing our client has the dress on. We want the outer material to be the only thing they say. We don't want to be able to see any of the lining. Roll it under quarter-inch, quarter-inch. And I'm just going ahead about six inches from the needle itself. Don't worry about trying. Some people try and fold it back here. You're not gonna get the control that you need. Just fold it in directly at a 90 degree angle, quarter-inch, quarter-inch hole that they're kind of just smooth and fold the material and it falls into place and we just keep on going just like our gene hams, but this one's just a quarter-inch. Of course this is called a top stitch because I own a finished. On the outside of the material. We have a top stitch and we can see that I do this all the way around the lining. Same thing once we approach a scene that has rendered into the ham, tuck it under same quarter-inch, quarter-inch, hold it into place. Manipulate the material so you liked the way it looks nice and smooth. Let's get up to that area. It's a little thick, leaves the needle end. And let's do some more manipulation. We're now approaching where we began. Trimmer threads, overlap our stitching. Just a little bit of a security stitch and we can take that out. At this point, we're going to go to the pressing table and we're going to get our finished pressing our hem. We're at the pressing table. We want to make sure we give the entire have a good Press. You can see even the lining. It still has that puffiness. Take our iron, give it a bit of steam. And you can use your clapper if you'd like to keep it flat. You can see how that flattens that out nicely, compares. It's not much difference, but it's just the cleaner. You can see how this is still puffy, that gives it a nice flat edge. So let's continue around. You don't need to spend a lot of time on pressing that. You need to spend some time on it. You can see also when we do our work, how it's a little wavy. Pressing will give us a nice flat finish. And even if your client has asked for you to steam the entire garment at some point, you cannot get the flat finish from pressing with steaming, you always need to suppress your work first. The Taylor who train me always said whenever you saw something, always pressing, we're almost to the end. That's lining is pressed now. And now we'll put up our outer material. Another tip you'll find is even if your client has asked you to steam, which will get rid of all 0s. Um, it's very hard to steam the very edge of this material for that so delicate and the steam just kinda pushes it. So getting a nice flat area is only done with the iron. Okay. So I'm straightening it out. Remember how some of the parts of the hem are kind of curled because they were on what's the biased. You can see this curve. What's going to be amazing is that when it's on the client, it is actually going to be parallel to the floor still. This obviously is an area that has a lot of stretch in it. That's why it's on the bias. See how it's curling in. That's another reason why we need to give it a press to flatten that out. Remember the clapper just kinda helps to cool down your material so that when you go to move it around, it keeps the flat press, but it also helps to cool it down. So when you move your material around, you're not it's not critically because it's, it's hot still, the material is still hot. So that's why sometimes I'll even give it a little bit of a fluff because if this is hot and I put it over here and it's getting all bunched up. I'm going to just be putting in another bunch of wrinkles. Never-ending process. See how I gave this just that little bit of a poll to flatten that out nicely. I think we're almost around to the other side. This is probably the front of the skirt. The reason I know that. Can you see how it's making that point? That point generally, we had seen on other skirts, the parts of the skirt that had the scene. This is probably the very front, which is cut on the very bias. So let me see if I'm right. Yeah, see that's the front and that's why it looks like that has that pointy look, but just because it's cut on the bias. But we don't have a seam in the front of our garments generally. And I think we are almost all the way around. All right, go there. All the way around. Let's take a little bit of a look at this. Because I want to show you how even at this point, it doesn't look as wavy as it did when it's on the board, but see how nice that ham turned out. If you have any chalk showing, I obviously have some chalk showing from the first time she fit. Just take a damp cloth. I usually just take a damp washcloth and that will generally allow us to brush away though was extra chocks. We don't want too many of those, but this is just because she tried to dress on originally without her shoes. And then I will just dry that up eventually. But we just use a damp cloth to get rid of any extra chalk marks. But at this point, our skirt is ready for our customer to try on. 6. Lesson 5: Lined Straight Skirt with Slit: Our client has brought this dress into us. She's requested that we have in the dress. She came in, we did the pinning. So now I'm going to walk you through the steps to do the ham. This dress is lined and it also has a slit that we are going to be finishing off. So let's begin. This is where we have the dress pin from our client. We flipped up the material. You can put a chalk mark if you want at the base of the fold. Or you can just take your ruler if you want and measure how much is folded in here we have 2.5 inches, either one as long as we have a final number. This is going to be hemorrhage 2.5 inches all the way round. Let's take a look at the inside construction at the ham are lining has a half-inch top stitch will be replacing that, of course. And the inside of our dress is blind hemmed. Um, it has some ham tape on it. We're not going to replace the ham tape. We're going to do a finish on ours with surging, we're going to search the bottom and then do a blind hem, but we're not going to replace the ham tape. Sometimes somebody may do that if they don't have a surgery to do the ham. So that's maybe why that's there because we have a surgery. We're going to surge and then blind him. So the first thing we need to do is we're going to actually mark the outside of her dress. I'm going to flip it this way. And at this point, I want my lining actually the same with the slit facing me. Because the first thing I want to do is make sure that when I'm drawing my line, let's get that out of the way. Lying flat. Because a straight skirt. There we go. I can see here at the original ham, one side is like quarter of an inch longer than the other side already. We want to make sure that's not going to be happening. That's why we wouldn't want a ham the whole dress, 2.5 inches exactly as is because then our hand will be exactly the same, but just 2.5 inches shorter with a quarter-inch. This slide not fitting. So I'm going to 2.5 and right there. So I know when I have my dress and I folded exactly on that line, it's going to be perfectly even and that's one of my main goals whenever you have a slit or event. Alright. I'm going to measure over to the side seam, 2.5 inches. And this dress has inch and a half tucked inside. So we're gonna do the same. So at this point That's our finished him. But we're going to cut a seam allowance the flip inside of inch and a half. So I'm putting a line inch and a half below that. Let's connect our dots. That's our finished line at 2.5 inches. And this is our cut line where we're going to be surging at inch and a half. You can also see here laying nice and straight. There seems to be some sort of a little bend in the fabric. We want to make sure ours doesn't have that either. That's why I'm going to mark 2.5 over here inch and a half and draw a straight line. I'm not concerned that that's a little bit different. I want my hem to lay straight, not have this bend in it. There we go. Flip the dress over and we're going to mark the front. Just the same. Just laying flat. 2.5 inches inch and a half in the middle, 2.5 inches inch and a half. That is why I also like using my skirt marker as opposed to hemming some dresses this a set amount. Because when we use the skirt marker, we are guaranteed that it's going to be parallel when on our customer. But this client. Just wanted to have it flipped up that much. So that's why we're just doing our best to make sure it's going to be even when she's got it on is even all the way around. So now at this point, we need to separate the lining from the outer material as well as the hammer cutting is going to run into their old ham, so we need to take that out. So first thing I'm going to do, I know this is a blind hem with our blind stem stitch. So I'm going to start over here. Click the stitches underneath that, Hamilton them. All out. There we go. We have the blind HAM removed. We can see that the backward or the slit is, it's been sown in tact down here, so we're going to remove that. Let's use a blade. Looks like they just hand so that there. And we want to remove the lining along this scene where it's joined to the outer material, as well as they've have a seam here where that's finished off, we're going to get rid of that two. And that will actually release our lining. There we go. There we go. So rereleased that and then we can undo or lining a little bit. There we go. We ended that little faster than I want it. And the same here. And do this side where it's been hand sewn, little bit stitching from the still there and do the same where they finished off. Now when we put our scene back, we're going to do it a little bit different. It's just because I always put it back the same way all the time. And that's the way we're going to put it back. It's using the same method. If this was a skirt on its own or even if this is a jacket of some sort that has the similar finish, we put it back just the same way. Makes life easy. Alright? And I give that a little press, flatten that out, make it easier for us to work with. Okay, there we go. And do the same to the other side. Just make it easier for us to work with when we cut. Because there's folds in there. Now typically, I get this around so you can see when this was all finished off. Your lining is in generally is it's finished. How will always be about one inch above the finished him of your skirt? I'm going to this is the finished him up my skirt into the facing of the line we're going to cut on. And I want that because I want to lay my lining onto here. That's my finished ham. The finish time of the lining is one inch above that that line. There's what I'm going to want. And I'm going to transfer that to the other side of the slit. The same thing. Role that that's the finished him. And then that's where we're cutting. So this is the lining and our bottom of her lining is one inch above that. Now we are going to mark the lining itself. Lay this out for you. And now the reason I mark it that way on the side, you may notice that the distance from my Newham to the bottom of the lining is two and a quarter. Reasoning would tell you that that line should be 2.5 inches because we're shortening everything 2.5 inches. But as you can see, because the lining is pulling here, That's why I'd rather draw that line in accordance with our new him. Because never assume that the original work is perfectly straight at this point. Now, I will do 2.5. Because if we were to have done this at 2.5, it would have been an inch in almost two inches above our new line. And the only line I'm really going to mark on here, since this is a half-inch gene ham. We're going to be turning it in half-inch, half-inch. So we need one inch for that. I'm actually just going to mark now my cut line, which this is inch and a half from there. So I'm just going to draw my cut line now. I could draw both, but I don't necessarily need to draw both lines to do a skinny jean ham. This new line is inch and three-quarters from here. I know the math doesn't add up. It's just now I'm just measuring inch, inch and a half inch and three. It should actually be inch and a half because it's actually above my finished outer material. The extra eighth of an inch is not going to make a maker or break this job one inch below there. So that's inch, inch and a half. I'm going to cut that there. That's my cut. There we go. Now I'm going to cut it, cut my lining first, the garbage. And now I'm going to cut my outer material. Just make sure when you're cutting that you don't cut anything underneath that's not supposed to be cut. At this point, we're going to go to the searcher and we're going to search this edge. And then we'll meet you at the straight stitch machine after that. Well, we're at the surgery. We are going to surge at the very bottom of the skirt. I'm also going to search the raw edge of the material here. This is part of the pleat. Were they had done a finish where it was finished off here, but hand sewn at the bottom. We're going to reverse that. So once I searched this and we do our finished, you'll see what I'm going to meet and what this is going to look like. So I want to finish off this raw edge here. Like that. I'm not worried about getting the lining and yet it's not going to show it all. Now I'm going to continue the surging along the bottom. Make sure you are. If there's any themes that are pressed flat open, make sure they stay flat. And I'm going to search that edge to, this is the other side of the slit. There we go. Now we're going to be back at the pressing station where we're just going to press your hands up. We're going to press the hammock onto that line and then we'll be at the straight stitch machine. I stopped back at the ironing board before I came to the machine just to press up the hammer on the bottom of the skirt. The majority of the time when we do any type of ham on that is more and blind hem that all like this. We will always press up into place. And our main objective is just to make sure we have a nice straight facing on the inside if anyone were to ever look at that. So I do have that pressed up and into place for us at the machine. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to put in the half-inch top stitch him That's going to finish off the bottom of our lining. Using a medium stitch, any like we normally do for basic sewing 2.5 to three, I'm going to churn in half-inch. Half-inch. Get this started. Okay. He's just the half inch top stitch him. Half-inch, half-inch. Well that into place. And there we go. Half-inch, half-inch. Looks nice, parallel. And so making sure our seams are lining up. Once again, I had to have the contrasting thread and here and here. Don't know why it's lining up this way, but it's not a problem for summaries. You can see how it's aligning perfectly straight here. But they're cut, they have flared out. So I'm just going to trim that up. Before I close that up. There we go. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to so my lining continued this seam down where the lining is joined onto here. Put that under where they finish that off with an actual seam and did a reversed stacking. We're going to finish her as off differently. This is the way we're always going to finish off. Continue up our sewing with the lining. See what that looks like on this side. There we go. So we do have that finished off nicely. There. We want to finish off. Along this edge. We're taking our opening up the facing, flipping our ham. Are facing backwards in lining up or ham. We're going to sew right on the Hamline for the fold is we've pressed that in. You can see that's exactly where I want to. So there I want to show you what that looks like from this side. Turn that right side out and see how we finish that off there. Let's get rid of this. Now remember, this will all be with the matching thread. Eventually, I'm just got the contrasting. So now what I wanna do is I want to make sure this is all going to stay in place, in lined up nicely. So I am going to tack open out. I don't want to touch my good material, but I'm going to baste along here this facing piece to what I have turned in on my ham. Open that out to get that out of the machine. Just close to the edge. And I want to make sure everything is lined up nicely. Nothing peaks out. Just gives it a nice finish. One of those jobs you could hand. So But why? When you can just stitch it. And there we go. And then that's finished off nicely there does any other strings get rid of in that side is done and finished. So now I'm going to go to the other side of the pleat or the this is actually a slit, a pleat. We'll be finished off in a similar fashion. First of all, we're going to continue sewing the lining down to the main material at the slit. We go, this is our finished tamper with the pleat backwards. So rate on our fold, the finished hem goes. During the material right side. Sure. We're on the line, right? Good. And now we've watched you based all these together, so this doesn't happen. That's my main goal there. So let's line those up. Lay them on there. That tucked in, open out or ham facing. Get that out of the machine if you want, you can always pin that. So that's straight down. Just enough attack that into place, give it a nice clean finish. Trim that up there. We have that side finished there. So at this point, we're going to go to the blind hammer where we're going to finish off this ham. We're at the blind hem machine. Once again, I do have a beige thread in here as opposed to the pink. I want you to see. I'm going to begin right here and begin our blind HAM stitching. Okay, for the outer material. Once again, I have the little slowly space or this little slit right here running on top of my searching. And generally this bar I have my surgeon pressing up against. Let's see, make sure that's catching. Stitching the little loose I'm going to tighten up here just a little. We do that for each project just to make sure it's getting each individual project getting the right tension and the right catching. We don't want it too tight or too loose. That's catching nicely there. And we can see on this side, how much does catching every other one, which is what I want to have it on the two-to-one where it skips every other stitch so it's not so prominent. And we'll finish this off. I love this machine. I don't like hands-on. So this saves me lots of time and does a much better job than I would get as close as we can. Turn the wheel of rotation takes so the needles out. And our main concern is we want to make sure we catch that loop. That. And when we take our workout and we see how nice of a job that's done. And it's nice and clean on this side also. We're done at this machine. Now we're going to go up to the press table. We're going to press it as well as I'm going to show you how we're going to hand. So one of the other times we do hands, so I'm the tacking generally the lining and the outer material will be tagged with this thin thread, a material so that it doesn't pull all over. And I'll show you how we're going to do that. I get depressed table. We want to give everything a good Press. The first step we're going to do is we want to make sure that our lining gets suppressed since we put a new him in that. There we go. This way. I'm also making sure my corners are pressed nicely. Do the same with this corner. We go. And then the remainder of aligning itself, do it on its own. We don't have to press it with the outer material. Now I want you to press the outer material itself. There we go. This will cause any other stitches or anything to blend in nicely to make that blind him even more invisible. There we go. Let's move this out of the way that this point. I always want to double-check that all the hard work we did to make sure this is lined up is in place and it should be. There we go. Make sure that's nice and smooth. It's the pump there. There we go. We can see how that lines up nicely there. Okay. This point, we want to tack are lining to the outer material at the side seams. This just prevents it from pulling up or down too much. You'll notice when you get a dress from a manufacturer that that's usually done. So I'm going to put our lining here like this. I've already gotten a thread, needle and thread ready to go. And this has a six plie. So we started out with three strands and folded it in half. So now we have six. And I've tied it in an art. And first thing I'm going to do is slip my needle underneath my seam allowance because I don't like my knots showing. That's my knots underneath. I'm going to do one little backstitch in place. And then the next one I'm going to do in the same spot. But at this point, I'm going to grab my loop. Makes sure my, At this point I wanna make sure my threads are all smooth, all my strands. And we're going to do a little trick. It's like a crochet type stitch. Basically, I'm going to put my fingers through the loop. I'm going to pull this thread through and tighten that up. Now I have another loop, pull that thread through and pull it down to the base. I'm gonna do that for about ten times or so, or till this string. You'll see it's making me stop for a second and show you it's making a little string. So I want to make that string about three-quarters of an inch long. Not much more than that. This is the same type of loop we would do if we were making a bustle or bra straps brought keepers, we would do the same technique. Once your string is as long as you want it, pull it through, completely tied off. And then at that point, we're going to attach it to the lining. And you'll see that that's joined now by my little thread. And we just need to secure it to our lining. A couple of back stitches just to make sure it's in place. Doesn't go anywhere. And take my pin out. And now my lining is joined to the other material. I think I should have enough to do the other side. And two time may not. And do the same on this side. Underneath seam allowance so I can hide my knot. Little backstitch in place. Another one just to get that started. A little smaller because I don't have as much room, but it's we can do it too. Just so it's about three-quarters of an inch. No one's going to be pulling out a ruler for this part. Just one more time. Then I'm going to just catch my lining. So that's joined. And let's not that off now with a few back stitches. Just want to make sure that's not going to pull out. And there you go. At this point, the entire dress is complete. We have our finished him. See how nice that looks on the side. Like nothing has been done. 7. Lesson 6: Take in Sides with Skirt Hem Combination: Our client has brought us as lovely dress. We have, I have shown you how to do what ham before. But with this particular project, we're going to combine it with taking in the dress fits your beautifully, but it's just the little big for her over her hips and down through to the hem. So I'm going to walk you through the steps for how we're going to do the marketing and the work for tapering, and then how that works in conjunction when we're also doing the hump. So let's take a look at how it's pinned. Me. Move this out of the way so I can lay this down. There we go. This is our skirt. And we have the ham flipped up. So at this point, I want to see how much we're hemming. So let's just look inside. We have 2.5 flipped inside. Let's check it here too, just to see if it's 2.5. And we have pinned on our client over the hips, at the waist at this same, you can see how I've pinned at close to nothing. That means we really don't need to do anything there. We're just going to blend that in. And you can see my pen marks as we go down through the ham. So once again, what I'm going to do is take a couple of points at my finished him. We want to take in each side two inches and let's say halfway up, inch and a half. And then we know we're going to blend that up if you want. I could even this one, you can always take a quick measurement of that's one inch and that is approximately six inches from the top waste. If you want, you can always take that too. But I know it's two inches, halfway up, inch and a half, and then one inch as six inches from the sea. So let's take those out. We're going to remove our old ham. Because since we're only doing the ham 2.5 inches, I know that that's going to run into my new ham, the work that I need. So we're going to first of all start by removing the old HAM. Okay, Here we go. There's still a pin in there. So thing with a print sometimes it's hard to see everything out. I'm clipping underneath the blind hem stitches so I can get that one that's going to pop up and pull out for us. There we go. At this point we're going to mark our ham first. I want the front of the dress up facing me. This dress has no slits and no lining. I would consider this just a straight skirt. And when I say straight, it just means that it's not overly wide. And there's really no flair to the skirt itself from the hip down. Alright. Now, anytime we have a garment like this that has clearly visible details in the print, especially because they do have it that's actually on grain. The original Hamlet cut nice. They're surging, It's cut straight along the lines. We want to make sure we're combining what we need for our hand, but also so that visually it doesn't get off kilter because it would look kind of silly. If we put our Hamon. And let's say, let's get that out away so you can see what I'm doing. If our ham looked anything like this, even in the slightest, that would be very visible. I know that's a bit more exaggerated, but you get my point. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to get it off kilter. So first thing I want to do, then I'm going to mark my new Hamline, 2.5. So this is my old ham 2.5 inches up. I'm gonna do the same over here, 2.5. Let's get that. But you can see with my marking 2.5, with my 2.5 falls right here, I actually am more concerned to get my new Hamline rate like that. So it's the same distance from this white line. Otherwise it'll be too noticeable if it's cricket. Let me draw that. Even though I've drawn the line, when I do my pressing, once again, I'm going to make sure that it looks visually pleasing from that line. I'm going to mark my cut line, which there'll be inch and a half below. So I can do the same with that. I'm just going to mark along here and you'll notice that this point, I'm not going to cut through the two layers because I want to make sure I'm still continuing this line through to the other side. Let's take a look at the side seems obviously their side seams aren't lined up perfectly, which is fine. But when I continue my new Hamline over at the back, that's where my new hams going to be. Because once again, when somebody is looking straight on from the back, I want to make sure that looks like it's all even with that line. I flip this over. A lot of times you'll just grab a job and you'll think it's just an easy mark and cut. And sometimes it's just not that simple. Alright? I'm thinking here because I have a little bit of a dilemma. You may notice that when that comes over here, it doesn't fall in the same place. I distanced from this line as it does on this side. So I need to decide how I'm going to handle that. I'm going to connect these. And then I'll see. Okay, I think if we do it right about, there will still be good. That will still have a pleasing line. I think it's better to have close to here. Then have this rate at the white and this one above. So I'm going to mark my cut line inch and a half down, which works out about on this white line. So at this point I'm going to cut before I forget, I'm only cutting single layer. Just when I thought the job was gonna be easy and chop, chopping. Little bit more, thinking to get a good quality job. Okay, spin this around. And I'm going to continue cutting single layer. Okay? Just a little side note about this particular project. If this wasn't so off-kilter, both on both sides. When we did this taper, we could almost try and get this all lined up. But because it is so off kilter, our chances of getting these actually lined up would be almost slim to none. So at that point it's not worth fighting with the material to get it lined up and then do our ham. We're just going to proceed with the ham and the taper as normal, but I just wanted to point that out to you. At this point, we're going to turn her garment inside-out so we can see our side seams. Want to make sure my chalk is nice and sharp. There's still a pin in there. It's not lying flat, so let's get that out. There's still one up here. There we go. Now with the dress lying, the skirt lying flat, going to press the one side same. So let's look back at our measurements. We had two inches at the bottom of the ham, halfway up with inch and a half. And about six inches down from the way switches, right about there. We had another one-inch pinned. So our main concern at this point is nice smooth lines. The bottom here to here. And at this point I'm not going to draw a straight line because we're at the hip. So our hips aren't that straight. And then this is the just below where this waste joins. We want to blend that to nothing. There we go. Going to move this over so we can mark the other side. Get rid of my label. Press flat. Whenever you press and then you're going to draw with your wax chalk. You always have to let this cool down a bit. Otherwise your wax chalk is just going to disappear. It's going to melt. Two inches, an inch and a 1.5 inch straight line at the bottom. We're going to blend that up. Nice smooth curve and blend to nothing at the waist. There we go. At this point we're going to go to the streets to machine and do our sewing and then to the surgery and clean up those seams with the search. We're at the straight stitch machine. Since this machine, this material is what I would call shifting, it's very slippery. I've decided to put some pins anchoring my two layers together down through the scene, which I am going to. So I found that out doing a test run and the two layers were getting shifted. So I took that out, I'm pinning it to help secure it. And this is where it's gonna be very important for you to make sure you're putting your attention on the front and the back of your material on the front and the back of the petal or the foot. Otherwise, it's going to get all off sync. So once again, I'm gonna put this under the machine. Blend into their original stitching, get a little bit going. There we go. You can see I have my first pin anchoring my two layers. So this way I can solo right over top of it. I'm putting tension on the front and the back of my material. I'm going to sew to just over my pin. Stop. Make sure everything's lined nice and flat. I can see my line which I want to so on. My other pin is here. And when I'm doing my polling, I want to make sure I'm holding on the opposite side of this pin. If I pull here, I could shift the two layers. So since that's already anchored, I'm holding and on this side of it so that it doesn't move any of the material. Nice and smooth and continuous sewing. The next little bit. And you can see I have a pin down at my ham. And you can see even with my pinning, it's still shifting a little bit. I'm not that concerned rate at this point. As I get down, I want to remove that. Reinforce. Some materials, look easy, but there are more difficult than what they are. They're more challenging. And you can see how that slipped down just that little bit. But of course when we do our surging, we're just going to surge and blend that in. It's not like all these lines are lining up in the first place. Let's flip over to the other side. This, this one I'm actually sewing from the bottom-up. Before I do anything, I want to put in some pins to anchors. I'm making sure this is nice and smooth. Let's put in one pin here. You'll up a little further, maybe about six or eight inches. Another pin. Sure. He's lying flat. Another pin here. And we'll see how that does. Start at the bottom. Reinforce. And now I want to blend this. Why? Others see? There we go. Remove our pins. I always want to check, make sure nothing got pinched. That's a nice smooth blend there. And on the other side, this is where it joined at the waist and the same here, nice smooth. So at this point we're going to go to the surgery and we're going to trim off. Down the scene we just made and we're going to put our good surge into the bottom of the ham. Were at the surgery. We're going to trim down these seams we just put in. Of course, just like when we were stitching here, we wanted to be careful that we didn't pinch anything with our stitching with because we're cutting with the surgery, we want to make double sure that with this time get that underneath, but make sure there's nothing underneath that's going to get pinched and cut where we don't want. Once again, we're just running this surgery along the stitching line. Now we're going to do the other side and go up. We blend that into their surgeon. And at this point we're going to search the bottom of the material. Doesn't matter really where we start. We just want to make sure all our seams are going in the right direction. So for me, I like starting on my back, seen the reason being because then I know the next theme is my side seam and then I know which way I'm going to press that when I do my surging. They're vaccine has been pressed open. So I'm going to lay that down like that with it. Let pressed open, slip that underneath, and continue cleaning off the bottom. Now that I'm approaching my side seam, obviously if I just came from the back, I know I'm going to press my side seam to the back, continue around. This is my back. So this seem gets pressed this way. And this was that seem that God off kilter that little bit. We just shave that off with the knife. At this point we're going to the press table to press the side seams in the proper direction to give them a smooth finish. And we're going to press up the Newham and getting it ready to go to the blind hammer out they earning board, we're going to slip our skirt on to the small board. Even though the same as just going in one direction. It is a dress, your outfit. I like to end because it's not as flexible or it doesn't stay in place like some of the genes might that I'm going to press from the inside first of getting this seem to go in the right direction and then we're going to press it from the outside. And some casual clothes. We can just do it in one step and just do the outside. But on dress your clothes, I find we have two. It gives a better result if we do the inside than the outside. Go around to do the other seam, which are the scenes is getting pressed towards the back. Now we're going to flip it right side out and press the same seems. Here we go. Spin it around to do the other side. Now we're going to use the iron to press up our new ham. We're just gonna do that in little batches. That's our line there. But remember, the main thing is what we want at this point is just making sure that it looks parallel. But also that our design lines in the print. Our straight. Because then on this side, it'll look good that way to still looking good. Okay. And our last little bit. So I wanted to just double-check how this is going to look from the good side. When I put that ham in, I'm pleased this is the front. That's looking good there. And then on the back also because the side seams aren't lined up in the first place. I'm not concerned with those. My main goal is that from the front and the back, our hands look even. So let's go to the blind stitch machine and get this put in. At the blind stitch machine. I do have gradient so you can better see where how this is working. Got this underneath, made sure I'm starting at my vaccine. It's pressed open. Let's see how the stitches going to work. Take a look before we go too far looking good. You can see it's a nice neat stitch, not too tight, not too loopy, and it is catching. So let's continue on. Because I already know this material is what I call shifting and can move. I'm just making sure I'm not pulling anything while I'ma this is running around. But I also am guiding the material to keep these lined up. Because like I mentioned before, one starts going that way. The bottom starts going faster than the top. It's going to get all off kilter. And then it's just not going to lay nicely. So I'm making sure these are staying lined up. And coaxing the bottom alone. Overlap a bit. Bring your needle out. There's my loop. Let's cut that and that is done. See what that stitch looks like there. I haven't read on top. And it looks good from that side, even generally, I would have done this anti-black, which would have caused it not to show even more. But like I said, for this purpose, I wanted to use the gray so you could see, let's go to the iron, press it and we are complete at that point. We just want to give our dress a final press. We have our ham in here. You can see how it's still just a little bubbly and wavy from us doing work on it. Going to flatten this out. Of course, use the clapper to hold that in the front side. And I just wanted to make sure my side seems also get a bit of a press the other side. Let's move this out of the way and take a look. At this point. Our dress is complete. We have it taken in nicely. See how we have this nice gradual taper and hanged for the clients and it's nice and straight better than the original was. Now at this point we're complete. The client is ready to take the dress home and and enjoy.