When we left off with Hemming 101, I discussed the ways I like to hem dress pants and jeans. This time I want to talk about the invisible hem. It is exactly what it sounds like – a hem that you can’t see from the outside.

There are two ways you can sew an invisible hem on a pair of pants – by hand and with a sewing machine. The sewing machine method requires a special foot for your machine (which I don’t have yet). For that reason I do my invisible hemming by hand. It’s longer to complete than if you were to do an invisible hem on a sewing machine, but is easy to quality control in case you make any mistakes.

For the invisible hem you’ll need scissors, a sewing needle, thread, pins, and pants.

If at any point you get confused or need to see this in action, I highly recommend this YouTube video. Let’s begin!

Start by pinning the excess fabric up to where you want to hem the pants. For this particular pair, I hemmed up 3 inches and created the hem by folding the original hem up twice.

Thread the needle and knot the end of the thread. Begin by bringing your needle up and through the bottom part of the excess fabric.

With the thread coming through the top of the excess hem fabric, carefully pick up a few inside threads of the pants with the tip of the needle, just above the hem.

Once you have a few inside thread picked up, bring the needle underneath the top of the hem and pull through.

Here are a few stitches on the pants I hemmed. As you can see the thread comes from the top of the fabric, a few interior threads are picked up, and the thread is then sewed down underneath the hem fabric.

Here are two views of the full hem sewed with the invisible hem stitch. It doesn’t need to be perfect or super tight.

Check it out – no visible hem!

Here is the finished product. You can see a vague indent of where the hem is but no visible threading. Oof, these pants definitely need to be ironed.