Photo Tutorial: How to Fix Frayed Pants

Photo Tutorial:  How to Fix Frayed Pants

Okay...so my husband brings me these pants...his work pants...and says "Honey they're frayed - fix 'em!".  So....I fixed 'em!  Well, sort of.  I looked at them, made some educated guesses as to how I could best go about repairing them, based on what I've learned in the week or so that I've been sewing, and got to work!

IMPORTANT:  During the course of this tutorial, I made many mistakes.  It's okay because I learned from them.  However, if you are going to attempt this yourself, please read through the entire tutorial before proceeding and remember that if it goes horribly wrong, well....you have been warned lol.  Also, please feel free to comment - I would appreciate your feedback, whether its good or bad.  But please be nice to this noob!!  ;)

Supples Needed:  Sewing machine & a pair of pants (not shown), iron, thread, bobbin, scissors, ruler of some sort, marking tool (pencil), and some pins.

Here you have some busted up khaki pants.  They were just a tad too long on him, so they started to fray on the ends from scraping against the floor and such.

 

So the first thing I did was to make a cut about 1/4" away from the current hem line.

I then started to cut away!

I probably should have shown this first but...anyway lol...I used this handy guage to measure the 1/4" but you can use whatever floats your boat.

So here you can see the end result of my cutting.

Next, I started on the other pant leg, and I'm just showing you that I used a pencil to mark the 1/4" spot so I'd know where to cut.  Just do the same thing as before and cut all the way around the pant leg.

 

Let's review... Here we have two pant legs, with the bottom frayed parts cut away, about 1/4" away from the seam that was already there.

 See the line my pencil is pointing at?  Well that's where I'm about to fold in the next picture.  Consequently, it's also the seam mentioned above lol.

 Alrightly so what you want to do is turn the pants inside out and then fold at that seam.  It should be the "natural place" where it folds easily.

 Now you need to pin it in place all the way around the pant leg.

 Once it's pinned, go ahead and press with your iron in between then pins.  You do NOT want to iron over the pins if they have a plastic end like mine.  If yours have a glass end, it's fine.

OOPS!!  At this point, I realized that I have all that fray there which will just start to come unraveled unless I do something about it.  So I decided I needed to do what's called "overcasting".  It basically is a method of "sealing" that frayed edge so that it wont come unraveled.  That was my plan anyway....I'm afraid it didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped, but hopefully it will last for a while until I can get some more experience lol.

 So to continue....these are some stitches that my machine can do.  Number 14 is the one I started out using but it wasn't working out, so I jumped to number 8 which worked a bit better, but still not perfect.

 OOPS!!  Just as I was about to begin sewing, I realized that I had black thread in my machine, which wouldn't exactly look good on his khaki pants.  So I glanced at my measley 6 or 7 threads I have - definite sign of a noob.  And I grabbed a kind of moss green color.  I would later regret it.  But the color was closer than anything else I had, so I went with it.

 In case you don't know, this is a bobbin winder.  What's a bobbin, you ask?  I did too.  LOL.  Okay a sewing machine actually uses TWO threads, one is the thread and the other is the bobbin.  They can be the same color, and usually are, or different if you want them to be.  The regular thread is called the "upper" and the other one is called the "lower" because that's usually where they can be found in the machine.  The upper thread is the big spool.  The lower thread is the tiny spool called a bobbin which you can see here (the clear part in the picture above).

 In order to "wind the bobbin", in my machine I just load it up the way the arrows point me to do so, and then I push a button and voila....it starts winding big spool of thread around the little spool until it gets full and then it stops.  When it does, you take the bobbin out and put it in its proper place in the machine.  *If you are having problems with threading your machine, winding the bobbin, or putting the bobbin in its place, refer to your machine's user manual.  Mine was super helpful and spoke to me like the noob that I am.

 This is my automatic threading mechanism.  My machine is pretty easy.  I just pop in my thread, follow the little arrows and numbers to wind the thread around the little casing...

 

 pop it into my machine...and it will automatically thread the needle....most of the time.  Now here I should mention that the thread I chose, although the right color, caused me alot of misery.  First of all, who knows how old it is.  The spool is made of wood....which concerns me.  Most are made of plastic (aren't they?).  Also, I had several problems with the thread breaking and not wanting to cooperate with my handy dandy automatic needle threader, which really ticked me off.  So FYI, use a nice strong thread if you can...or be prepared to spend alot of time cursing at your machine.

 

 FINALLY ready to start sewing the edges to help cut down on fraying.  There is actually a machine that does only this....called a serger.  I want one.  Now.

Here's how it looks at this point....I cut off those pieces that were sticking out that were already frayed.  Hopefully this will at least lessen the fraying.

Now it's time to sew again.  This time I am sewing just to the right of the frayed/overcasted edge.  I just used a straight stitch here.  Be sure to remove the pins - don't sew over them or you might break your needle, send it flying into your eyeball....not pretty.  And be careful because those stupid pins will poke you in a heartbeat!! Oh and yes, I am aware that my lines are hideously crooked lol.  But for now I'm just happy if the lines actually make it onto the fabric instead of sewing into thin air.  :-/

 

Okay so the pants are still inside out, and the sewing is complete...this is how they look right now.

 

If you turn them rightside out, as you can see it looks alot better!  No more frayed edge.

 

Hit it with the iron again to lock in those seams.

 

And we're all done!  Is it perfect?  No.  Are my lines straight?  No.  Will it come unravelled?  Probably.  LOL.  But the important thing is that I got the job done, and my husband will be happy, and I learned some things and will do a better job the next time I have to hem something.  :)  Thanks for reading!!