Transcript
Hi, I’m Jennifer from Workroom Social and I’m going to show you how to use a blind hem foot on your sewing machine.
Before we start, we need to prepare the fabric that we’re going to use when using this foot. I have this piece of fabric and I just want to make a fake hem. We’re going to do a double-turned hem. I’m just going to fold this half up and give it a little press. Then I’m going to take it and fold it again so that this raw edge is enclosed and we cannot see it, and then give it a little press. Great. If you look from the front side, we just have a nice, clean, finished edge.
Now, before we use our foot, we need to prepare this further. What you want to do is take, from the wrong side of your fabric, the side with the fold, you want to flip it over so that your finished edge is on your left and the rest of your garment or your fake edge if you’re doing a test like this, is on your right. Then you want to take your garment and pull it back to the left, so you kind of make this shape here on the edge of your fabric.
Now, from here, we want to measure about a quarter of an inch, so get your seam guide out and measure about a quarter of an inch and we’re going to give this a slight press. We don’t want to press this too hard because we don’t want to make a crease in the fabric. But, as you can see, this is bubbling a lot and so, when we put that through the sewing machine, it’s going to be a little obnoxious.
If you hover your iron across the top so just some steam gets on the fabric, it’s going to just flatten that out a little bit. Then what you can do is get your pins out and pin your seams together to hold everything in place. Now we’ve prepared our fabric and we’re ready to go to our sewing machine.
We have our hem prepared and now we’re going to attach our blind hem foot. When you do a blind hem on a sewing machine, your sewing machine stitches several straight stitches and then it does one zigzag stitch to the left to kind of catch the fabric. On the blind hem foot we have a little gauge on the side that kind of helps align your fabric so that the bite that the zigzag takes only catches the very edge of the fabric.
Take your foot and you’re just going to put it down on your machine, attach it like so. Make sure you take your top thread and put it underneath and both threads to the back. The blind hem foot, because every sewing machine is different, it has a gauge so you can kind of move it to the left or right. You should do some tests at home first to make sure that you’ve got it in a good position.
Right now I’m going to take my prepared piece of fabric and I’m going to put the quarter inch on the right, underneath the foot. Then I’m going to take this little attachment here and put the fold on top of it, and then I’ll lower my presser foot. What you want to see is that the attachment I have here on the right is actually sitting underneath the fold on the left.
Before you start stitching, make sure you go to your stitch selector and select the blind hem stitch. On mine, it looks kind of like mountains and valleys. You want something that’s kind of got a couple of things going sideways and then up in a triangle, and then sideways again. Then you should pick your stitch length; I’m just keeping mine at a 2.5. Then you are ready to stitch.
I’m going to do a couple of stitches and then, when I get to my pins, I’m going to stop, pause and take my pins out because we don’t want to sew over our pins.
When you’re done, just pull your project out, clip your thread tails and now, from that side where we just hovered the iron for a little bit of steam, this is what that side looks like. Now, when you unfold this, this is what your blind hem stitch looks like. Now we’re going to take this to the iron, press it flat, and it’s going to look really, really professional.
Okay, now that we’ve made our stitch, we just want to press this out so it’s nice and flat. We’ll just go to our fabric; if you’re pressing on the right side of your garment, make sure you do some tests first to make sure that the iron won’t create a sheen on the fabric. We’ll go to the back and just give it a nice little iron. Then here’s your blind hem stitch.
Now we can see all the little bites that our sewing machine made when it did that little zigzag over to do the blind hem stitch. But, if you match your thread to your fabric (for us blue), you really hardly notice these stitches at all. So it’s a really nice way to finish a garment for a really professional look.
