How to Trim Before Hemming Pants

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now I am going to show you how to prepare pants for hemming. Hemming the pants with a blind stitch end with a straight stitch are prepared the same way. First have the person try on the pants and tuck the excess material inside and pin it to where they are comfortable wearing the pants. So usually I like to for pants make it go right below the heel almost touching the ground but not exactly touching the ground. So you pin that and tuck the excess material inside and first we are going to just press lightly to just make a crease where we've pinned it. Just on both legs we will press it just to crease it. Use a steam iron; it works best. Then turn the pants inside out. You can pull your pins out at this part because you've creased it, marked it. All right now you see these pants need to be hemmed quite a bit and we have too much material for what we want. We are going to cut off what we don't want. First I am going to remove the pins because we've already marked it. I'll remove those pins and then I am going to cut off the excess fabric; anything more than one and half inches and just cut that all the way around making sure you do not cut anything but the excess. Make sure your scissors do not go through the other side. Just cut off that excess fabric and it is about an inch and half. "