Jeans Seams

I've been intimidated for a long time by jean. It's the one material that I've not even attempted to buy and sew since I started sewing. Except for velvet, but only because velvet is darn expensive and I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to purchase such a useless and expensive fabric.

I finally bought some jean to make a skirt with a couple of months ago. It was a light-weight, dark colored jean and sort of stretchy. I made a skirt with it. As I sewed the first two seams on the skirt I realized there was no way that I could just leave the seams open like I do with other material. I'd have to fix them up. But how do they do that with jeans? That's a good question.

Being the industrious seamstress that I am, I applied a tutorial that I saw on Sew, Mama, Sew for a seam on men's dress shirts to the seams on the skirt and holy smokes, it works really well. Here's a quick tutorial. This technique can be used on any garment that you make as long as you don't mind a lot of exposed thread.

After you have sewn your seam, trim one side of the seam to 1/4".

There you can clearly see the line of stitching and the two edges of my seam, one cut to 1/4" and the other still the standard 5/8" seam.

Fold the long side of the seam over the short side.

Now fold the seam on top of itself so that the cut edge is covered by all the folding, like this.

Iron all this down all the way down the seam and pin if you like or need to. I found that I didn't need to with the jean material but with other lighter fabrics you might need to pin.That's the whole seam folded and ironed.

Now sew the seam down on the inside of the garment.

Turn the garment over and sew down the other side so that you have two exposed lines of stitching.

Wah-lah! Jeans seams. I had not found the jeans thread when I made this skirt, but now I have so maybe I'll post pictures of what it looks like with the yellow jeans thread.