for the short ladies ...

I KNOW that I cannot be the only short girl out here in blog world. I'm 5'1" and I have trouble finding jeans that are short enough for me.

Just last week, I bought a new pair of skinny jeans. I washed them over the weekend (because I never wear clothes without washing them first - you never know who tried them on before you bought them) and put them on yesterday to see how long they were. Y'all, they were half-way down my foot! (please excuse my chipped toenail - apparently my heels rub the polish off)

After some research (i.e. google), I found about a dozen different ways to hem my jeans. Using those sites as inspiration, I figured out how to shorten these bad boys and still keep the nice hem at the bottom. I don't know about y'all, but there is nothing that I hate more than when my pants LOOK like I hemmed them. So here is the how-to on how to shorten a pair of jeans (or any pants, I guess) while keeping the original hem. No cutting required!

1) Roll up the bottom of the jeans so that they are the length you want.

2. Measure the length of the cuff, not including the hem. As you can see from the picture, my pants are 2.5 inches too long. I really would have thought longer, but I guess not.

3. Re-cuff the pants to half that distance. For example, since mine need to be shortened by 2.5 inches, I will re-cuff them at 1.25 inches. Pin in place.

4. Sew the jeans as close to the original hem as possible. Be careful over the side seams - my sewing machine jammed once or twice.

5. Fold the cuffed part inside the jeans and press with an iron (if you want to).

No one will know unless they are inspecting the bottom of your jeans - and who does that anyway??

You have a few options for what you want to do with the leftover fabric on the inside of your jeans. I'd rather not cut the fabric, so I just do a quick running stitch on the inside (in a thread color as close to the color of my jeans as I can find) to keep the extra fabric close to the jeans. This is especially helpful with skinny jeans. I didn't do this to this pair of jeans (yet - I need to) and when I put them on, my foot folded the fabric back out so I had to tuck it back in.


Hope this helps some of the short ladies out there! And for those of you that aren't so short, maybe you can use this same method to shorten a pair of capris or crops to a more "ideal" length for your body! If you try it, send me a picture - I'd love to see how it turns out!