But no matter what fabric or design you use you have to finish the hem beautifully. A well-finished hem is a very important sewing operation and adds a professional touch to any garment. In conclusion, if you make mistakes sewing a curved hem you may end up chopping off inches of your skirt or dress. Take comfort in knowing that you’re not the first this has happened to, and you certainly won’t be the last. I tried to cover everything you need to know about sewing curved hems. Armed with all this guidance you can approach sewing curved hem with confidence and wear your newly finished garment with pride. Narrow zig-zag hem, similar to serging. You fold once and use very close zig-zag stitches (buttonhole kind of stitch) to cover the fold. Excess fabric is trimmed out. This is best for sheer fabrics like chiffon, organza or silk;

Make a regular straight stitch (2mm length and tension at 0 or close to 0 ) about 1 cm from the edge. If you are making them for a circle skirt you will see that in some places the fabric will be a little gathered and in other places the fabric will be a little stretched after you made that stitch. Try to evenly distribute the fabric so that it will be no gathering and stretching, make it as flat as possible, and press.

Curved Hem

Alright now, let’s finish this article. There are a few other methods to sew a curved hem (like making rolled hems by hand sewing or using underlining and lining to sew hems, etc.). So choose one that suits you the best and be careful with hemming because mistakes can be costly (you will have to alter the length of your garment). This remind me to tell you a joke. This type can be used if you want your hem to be quite wide – 3-4 cm. It is suitable for woven medium and heavyweight fabrics like flannel, gabardine, denim, coat fabric, twill, linen, all kinds of cotton, some types of silk, for example, silk dupioni, etc., and also for faux and natural leather. It can be used on circle skirts and half-circle skirts made from medium-weight fabrics. Make adjustments on your sewing machine for zigzag stitch – it should be 1.5-2.00 mm by 0.3-0.4. Use proper needle for your fabric, and suitable thread. I like to use 100% silk threads for this kind of hems. Stitch along the folded edge so that on the left the needle is going into the fabric and on the right of the zigzag it goes out and doesn’t touch the fabric. Practice scrap fabric before sewing your garment. I like to use bias strips (or just elastic strips) with any lightweight and medium-weight fabric, especially with silk organza fabric. You can make bias strips yourself, or use already made ones bought from a store. Bias tapes are cut on the bias so they are a little stretchy which is good for sewing curved hems.

Remember, that often we don’t want any stitches showing through to the right side of the garment. And also make sure no folds or ridges from gathering the fabric are visible from the right side of the garment. When a straight hem just won’t do, a curved hem can turn a plain skirt or a dress into a work of art! Learning how to make a curved hem comes in very handy, especially when making dresses or circle skirts. Here is an easy method that will give you a smooth, neat finish on any round hem. Curved Hem For the regular sewing machine hem, you still need a bit of patience while folding and ironing, but the satisfaction will be worth it! Other sewing tips you will love:Leave it unfinished if the fabric allows. This works well with leather, polyester, mesh, any fabric that doesn’t unravel. The second step – measure and mark the distance of 6-8 cm from the hem edge. You can use a regular ruler or some special measuring tools like this small gauge for marking the distance. This tutorial will teach you how to hem a circle skirt the very easy way, so no more frustration or ugly hemlines! The technique is best used for medium weight fabrics. For light and heavyweight fabrics, you might want to use a serger first. Special “ invisible” stitch of your sewing machine (using a special presser foot – a blind stitch foot)

The third (and the main!) step is to make a gathering stitch at about 0.7 – 1 cm from the curved hem edge. Put stitch length to 4-5 mm and tension to 0. Stitch on the wrong side of the fabric. Don’t stitch around all hem at once. Divide it into smaller sections (at the side seams for example) and gather each of them separately. You can always sew the curved hem on knits by hand ( invisible stitches). But in this case, fold the hem in 1 cm, baste, press, and then fold it again (2 -3 cm), baste, press and sew. Use thin but strong thread, like Eloflex, or silk thread. The problem with this type of curved hem is that the hem size at the edge is larger (or we can say also longer, wider) than the size of the hem on the fold (an actual hemline). And because of this, we will have to deal somehow with this fabric surplus – we will have to make it smaller for the hem to look nice. Save

OOPS!

Did you ever happen to wash a beautiful glass vase, only to drop it after and watch helplessly how it shatters ( clean, nevertheless ! ) into a million pieces? Frustrating, right? The same is true when hemming a dress for which you have probably worked many hours. Since the hem is one of the last items to be sewn, rushing the job to get it done may result in costly mistakes that are difficult to fix. I’ve used this method for curved hem when I made a circle skirt for my daughter and I really loved the finished look, even though I admit, I was a bit sloppy; I could’ve used paying a little more attention on details and sewing more accurately. I thought I should make a separate article on how to hem a curve, for ease of reference. There are many methods of finishing a curved hem:

Serging, where you pass the raw edge through a serger and either leave it like this or fold once to make a folded hem on heavier fabrics For lightweight fabric we usually make a narrow curved hem. There are many different methods of sewing the curved hem with lightweight fabrics like silk charmeuse, chiffon, georgette, cotton voila, etc. There are also a few methods to sew bias strips. But for all of them, you have to make sure that the part of the bias tape that stays underneath is caught in the stitching.Straight stitch your sewing machine with a stitch length of 2-3 mm for lightweight fabric and 3-4 m for heavier fabric.