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If you’ve found the prom dress of your dreams, you probably don’t want to spend the whole night tripping all over it. If you’re naturally petite, you’ve probably dealt with clothes being too long before.
You also may have picked a floor-sweeping dress with the intention of wearing sky-high heels, but perhaps you couldn’t find a comfortable pair to wear for dancing the night away. Fortunately, you don’t have to give up your perfect prom dress.
Hemming is one of the simplest alterations you can make to a garment, even a prom dress. Most people don’t regularly get their clothing altered these days, though, so you may not know where to begin. In this guide, we’ll take you through the basics so you know how to hem your prom dress.
Hem it Yourself
If you have some sewing skills, you may want to try hemming your dress yourself. It will still be much easier to hem it with some help during the measuring phase of the process.
Measure Your Hem
You’ll need:
- A ruler or measuring tape
- An erasable fabric marker
First, you’ll need to put on the dress along with the shoes you intend to wear it with to see how much of the skirt you need to raise. This is easier if you have a friend who can crouch down and mark the bottom of the skirt for you. You can even stand on a chair to be closer to eye level for your helper.
If you’re doing it alone, it’s a little more difficult, but still possible. You can look at your dress in the mirror and estimate how much you need to raise the hem. Then take off the dress, measure that amount from the bottom, mark the dress, and put it on again to see exactly where it hangs on the body at that mark. You may have to try a couple of times to find the exact height you need.
Once you’ve determined how many inches you need to remove from the length, you’ll want to carefully measure that all around the hem. Measure from the bottom and mark it out evenly all around the circumference of the dress.
Sewing by Hand
You’ll need:
- A hand-sewing needle
- Thread that matches your dress
- A box of straight pins
- Scissors
After measuring and marking the level of your hem, you’ll need to pin it up. Fold under the bottom of the hem up to the line you’ve marked, then secure it with pins every few inches. Once you have it secured, you’ll start working from the inside of the gown.
Take the bottom portion and fold the original hem down inside the fabric you’ve already folded to the inside of the dress. When looking at the inside of the dress, you’ll just see a folded edge.
At this point, you can remove the original pins you used to fold it over to secure the new double fold in place. This is the most common style of hemming– a double fold. That just means that the edge of the fabric has been folded over twice to the inside of the dress.
You can try on your dress one more time at this point to make sure it looks nice and even, and falls at the length you want. It’s easier to fix any little errors now, rather than after you’ve sewn.
Now it’s time to start sewing. Thread your sewing needle and anchor your first stitch so any knot will be hidden inside the dress.
The prom dress experts at Sherri Hill told us that your best bet for sewing the new hem is to use a running back stitch. This stitch technique involves lots of stitches in a row that are occasionally anchored by a back stitch, a stitch that goes back through a previous one for extra security. When getting to the end of your thread, be sure to finish your row of stitches with several back stitches, so the thread doesn’t come loose later.
Sewing by Machine
You’ll need:
- A sewing machine
- Thread that matches your dress
- A box of straight pins
- Scissors
Follow all the previous steps of measuring, marking, and pinning your dress, but instead of hand-sewing, you’re going to use a sewing machine. If a friend or family member has a sewing machine, they can help you set it up. Make sure you have the right needle and foot on the machine for the kind of material your dress is made of. If it’s a stretchy material, for example, you may need to use a special foot and needle.
Very carefully sew as straight as you can along the edge of the double-folded hem you pinned earlier.
Make sure to use not only thread that matches your dress, but make sure the bobbin is also loaded with matching thread since that will be visible from the outside of the dress.
Get Outside Help
Maybe you have no sewing experience and don’t feel comfortable trying something new on a dress you spent ages picking out. Some dresses may simply take much longer to hem if they have many layers because each one will need to be hemmed individually, or you may need a special needle to work on certain fabrics.
You may need to get someone else to hem your prom dress. Fortunately, there are some good options for that as well.
Try Your Local Dry Cleaner
Many dry cleaners also offer tailoring and alteration services. Check online to see if one near you offers these services. You may need to make an appointment in advance, but often you can just bring in your prom dress.
They will likely have you try the dress on with your prom shoes so they can measure how much your hem needs to be raised. Then, you will leave the dress with them and make an appointment to pick it up in a few days. Very few tailors will be able to do the work on the same day, so plan ahead if your prom is coming up soon.
Ask Friends or Family for Help
Sewing is slowly becoming a popular hobby again and it’s definitely a useful one. You may know someone who knows how to sew, so you could always ask for their help. As you may have realized reading this guide, sewing can be hard work and time-consuming. Some people only enjoy sewing their own projects.
So, if you ask someone for help, maybe ask them to help teach you how to do the sewing yourself, instead of having them do it all for you. Or you could offer to pay them a small amount, or even trade them for their work. Maybe you have a cool skill you could use to do something for them.
You Can Hem Your Prom Dress
While sewing can take a little time, it’s definitely an option for fixing the length of your prom dress, whether you are hemming your prom dress by hand, or by machine. And if you have no sewing skills, you still have options.
So don’t worry if your dream dress is a few inches too long, it’s an easy fix.