The Cheater Guide to Good Hems

I suck at hems. I really seriously do, I am terrible at them. I have two skirts currently shoved in a cupboard until I can be bothered trying again to make with the non droopy hemline. Which may explain why I prefer to hack other things to bits to make skirts out of.

Peek at the picture (you can click to see the full sized one, we have the technology). The waist “band” is an old pair of jeans, and the panels are made from the legs of several pairs of cords. I love how this came out, and I LOVE that I was able to cheat totally on the hemline and simply use the prehemmed bottoms of the cords legs.

The major tip I will pass on to you is if you ARE going to recycle the hems of an existing something, when you sew your panels together, sew from the bottom up. That way you can match your hems perfectly, even if you’ve been a bit slapdash with the measurements of your panels (which I always am). You can fix any unevenness in the topedge very easily when you sew your waist section on, it’s a lot harder to tidy up mismatched hems.

As for making the above skirt, it’s really just a gored skirt but with the top measurement for the gores taken from the width of the bottom of the jeans section, if that makes sense. I’ll try that again. Instead of measuring your waist and dividing by X number of panels, you cut the legs off the jeans and measure the width of the new hole, then divide that.

To find the maximum width of your gores, measure the bottoms of the legs of the cords, and pick the narrowest. These gores are cut on the seam to give me extra width, but if you like you can cut down the leg. Narrower gores, less of a seamed look. Up to you.

I’m not going to go into technical detail here, simply because when I made this thing I ended up with a spare gore, so I’m clearly not the person you should be seeking advice from. Apart from the hem tip, that’s awesome advice :nods: