Sewing Alteration - 19 June 2025

Firstly I need to apologise because there are no full before or after photos for this project. The quality of the progress photos is also a bit low because a) the fabric was very dark, and b) everything was done in real haste. I barely had an hour to complete this task.

My friend bought a dark blue blouse top which you can actually see being advertised here from a company called Yours Clothing. She liked the fit but hated the bubble hem which was basically an elasticated bottom hem. You can sort of see it in the photo above. My job was to take that off and make a simple hem.

The task was simple in theory but I first needed to get rid of the elastic :

This was again easier said than done because the elastic made the fabric very bunched up as you can hopefully see above. Fortunately I had my seam ripper and slowly started checking the fastest way to get rid of the elastic.

For the record this was a size 20 top so it took a while to go around carefully unpicking the hem to get to the elastic.

In the meantime I kept on looking at the time as my friend was packing for a short trip so this top was needed as soon as possible.

In about 25 minutes or so I’d got rid of the hem and had managed to recover all the elastic which will be very handy in different projects. I then had to change the thread of my ‘cover stitch machine’ which took about 7 minutes - I’m getting faster at changing and threading the ‘twin’ needles.

I quickly pinned where I needed to hem and I'd finished the whole ‘job’ in about 45 minutes which is great from my point of view. I actually apologised to my friend for not ironing the hem but it was an urgent task. The top went in her suitcase straight away.

Considering all the time pressure I’m happy it turned out okay. I hope she can wear her top more comfortably now without the constricting bubble hem. It really gives me a good feeling to be able to make this sort of clothing alteration.

Thank you for reading !