Paragon of Pants

Enough about writing for a minute. Seriously. I did say this blog would be about anything that caught my fancy, so I wanted to tell you about a little project I did this summer.

I found myself shopping alone, for once. I really don’t know how. Were the kids in school/daycare? Was I out and about in the evening on my own for some reason, without wine? I don’t recall, but for whatever reason, I was shopping alone, and I found myself at Target. In the women’s section. By the clearance.

Low and behold, I find an item or two I want to try on and make my way to the fitting room. I’m going through the hangers I’ve brought with me and there’s a pair of capris. How nice. Let me try these on. Whoa. They fit! But what’s this? A large (seriously over 6 in worth) cuff of, I shit you not, the shiniest, most metallic, god-awful silver fabric at the bottom of these capris. It looked as if someone had come along and spray painted the inside legs of these capris in silver.

But there must be some mistake because these fit. Let me go check the rack where I found this paragon of pants and see. Not a mistake. Every pair has this same shiny cuff. Did I mention they were on clearance?

I don’t make a habit of buying clothes new to alter for lots of reasons, mostly because I’m paying good money for an article of clothing in a retail store—not a craft store—it should be what I want. However, these capris were a good price, and I felt confident enough in my abilities (and my sewing machine) that I could alter them to my standards, ie get rid of the shiny bit around the pants leg.

So I brought them home and proceeded to take a sharp pair of scissors to them. Goodbye metallic silver cuff, hello raw denim edge. Yea!—Not. I knew I would have to face my hemming demons at some point and this was the opportunity to do so.

And not just hemming—blind stich hemming, because if I was going to go through the trouble of hemming these pants, I didn’t want to be able to see it. Yes, I could had just folded them over and run a seam along it, but it would have been totally visible and nothing like the finished look I wanted or would expect to get from a store-bought pair of capris.

What’s a blind stich, you ask? Something you do in the dark? Not so much. A blind stitch is a way of joining two pieces of fabric in such a way that it’s barely visible. Yeah, there’s a stitch for that. A blind hem stitch is similar in that it’s a way of sewing a hem so that the stitch is barely visible. There are lot’s of tutorials for this, but if you follow along, fold your fabric and pin it accordingly you get a pert-near seamless-looking hem.

The capris came out polished looking. Almost as if the metallic cuff never happened. Of course, I wear these capris rolled at the bottom so they fall above my knee, but I know the stitch is there. I liked working with the blind hem stich so much I did it along the bottom of a dress for my daughter, which she still hasn’t worn, but hey, picture day is next week.