Cutting Out Inserts for Bell Bottom Jeans

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina Piroso and welcome to Expert Village. In this series we're going to talk about turning regular boring old jeans into funky bell bottoms. Now we're going to talk about adding the seam allowance and pinning the triangle pieces we're going to add for our bell bottoms. Whenever you sew you need a seam allowance, the seam allowance is what you are going to sew together. The actual fabric that you are going to sew together that shows on the inside of the garment. You can see here this would be the same allowance, the standard is 1/2" so I always use 1/2". If you are making something really thin with a light fabric or a lingerie type thing you are going to use a smaller seam allowance, but the standard is 1/2". Since this is our triangle shape that we're going to use to cut out we're going to go ahead and measure 1/2" out from the line. Again we're using sharpie marker just for this project but normally you would use a fabric chalk. We're going to go ahead and add 1/2" and now we're going to take our pins and first we're going to make sure that the jean is perfectly aligned with the back side. Make sure that front is perfectly aligned with the back so we're going to pin in the seam allowance. We're going to take our scissors and we're going to cut them out right along the seam allowance seam line. You are cutting both sides of the fabric. So when we are done we're going to have something that looks like this."