feeling smug about my new jeans. haven’t bothered hemming jeans for as long as i can remember, but finally had enough of them all shredding on the pavement at the backs in the first week and tripping myself up on the resulting flappy bits for the rest of their (brief) lifetime. i’m an unreconstructed flares/’dragging jeans’ wearer who refuses to join the 21st century and ever ever wear trousers narrow enough to show my shoes.

but hemmed jeans look so, well, hemmed and there’s the hassle of trying to find a kind of matching topstitching thread if you want to try and make them look less hemmed. but i remembered somewhere in the mists of my memory, undoubtedly from patternreview, about re-using the existing hems, so that’s what i did. i just folded up the spare and hemmed as close as i could easily get to the topstitching line with a zip foot. i could have squeezed closer but i didn’t want to lose the topstitching in the valley of the seam. i was going to run a loose hemstitch around, but just tacking at the side seams is holding it so far. was thinking about trimming the spare and zigzagging but would much rather leave unmolested and have half an hour’s less work to do if i can get away with it.

yay! no worrying about having the right colour thread and after a thorough press you can barely see the join unless you’re within 3 feet and looking for it.