How to Mark a Hem

Video Transcript

" Hi this is Andrew on behalf of Expert Village.com and right now I am going to be showing you how to measure for a hem line for slacks. Now the first thing you want to do is you want to put them on and let them drape all the way down your leg to where they fall naturally. Typically it is good to have someone else do it for you because if you try to do it yourself as you bend over to make the marks necessary to record where they line up, these slacks will ride up on your leg resulting in an inaccurate measurement. So when you put the slacks on you let them drape down you want to then have someone fold them back underneath so that the slacks line up where you want them around your ankle. And this is just a matter of preference but typically you want to have dress shoes on so that you know they are going to line up based on the height of when you wear your shoes. Once you have a good idea of where you want the slacks to fall, you fold it back and then you want to take either chalk or they have special marking pens that will wash out of the pants and you want to simply make a mark where the fold is just on the inside of the fold. Then once you have your hem marked you want to take the cuffs and lay them out flat on a flat surface and you want to measure the distance from the mark down to the end of the relaxed cuff. In this case, it is about an inch so what I am going to do is go around the entire length of the cuff folding up to an inch. Now once I have that all measured off I want to make sure that it is an inch all the way around so that the cuff is going to be the same length around once it is finished. One you do this you want to do the same thing with the other cuff of the pant leg and then you are ready to begin pinning the hem in preparation for actually hemming the material. "