hi I'm Toba with Professor pincushion and in today's tutorial I'm going to show you how to add piping above your hemline for a sophisticated cuff look you can alter the bottom of your pyjama pants like I do or do this to any other hemmed areas including sleeves I'll show you not only how to do a simple alteration for any pattern but also take you through the steps of sewing it together this is just one of the ways to make your garments more upscale without a lot of effort let's go ahead and get started you're going to want to put piping wherever you have a seam and since I want to put it at the hemline of my pants and I don't have a seam down there I'm going to create one by altering my pattern to create a cuff at the bottom of my pants so I'm just using a demonstration of my current pajama pants that I currently own to show how I'm doing this alteration so you'll see at the bottom of my pajama pants I have a hem of an inch and a quarter since I'm adding the cuff I can go ahead and get rid of this hem allowance now I'm not going to cut anything into my pattern because maybe I want to save it for something else later but for now I'm just gonna create a series of line so I'm gonna go up from the bottom my one and a quarter hem allowance and it's easy for me to tell because I have this indentation so from here this is what's getting folded under when I'm creating my pajama pants him so I'm going to first draw a line that goes straight across the bottom of my pajama pants then I'm going to decide how wide I want my finished cuff to be on the bottom of my pants because we're going to be creating a pattern for that so for me I'm just going to say the finished cuff is going to be two inches so from this line I'm going to go up two inches and I'm going to draw another line across the green line here represents both of those lines so right here at the hemline and then two inches above that now my pattern is really wide because my pajama pants pattern is actually one piece with front and back together in one leg so the next thing I'm going to do is lay my tracing paper over this area and I'm going to draw my tracing paper my cup outline so that would be this line the hem line this other line and then the top of the cuff line here so here's my outline for the cuff now because the cuff is going to be sewn to the bottom of my pant leg now I need to include a seam allowance so this top line is what's going to be stitched to at the top of my pants or - at the bottom legs of my pants so you need to decide whatever your seam allowance is so if you want to keep with pattern you can go ahead and just make it 5/8 so from this line I'm going to make another line that's 5/8 of an inch and draw another line across and that's going to be my seam allowance here's my pattern for the cuff so the solid line is the main outline that we had before you'll notice this dash line up here that is my seam allowance now that I'm sewing a cuff to the bottom of my pants I need to make sure that I have seen allowance so my pijama pants don't end up too short so I'm just making at five eighths of an inch like the rest of my pattern and this side point I'm not really following the angle of the pants instead I'm just trying to go straight up then I'm going to put my information set the Jama pants cuff I'm going to cut two and I'm placing this side on a fold because I want the inside of the cuff part at the my pants to look finished so there's going to be cuff on the outside and then I'm gonna fold part of it on the inside so that over look nice and finished now that I have a cuff being sewn to the bottom of my pajama pants this line becomes the new bottom of my pajama pants so just because I don't want to cut up my pattern or anything and I want to kind of save it I'm just gonna fold right on this top green line where the top of the cuffs going to be and I'll just fold it underneath my pattern like this and if you want to tape it you can go ahead and tape it I'm going to place a piece of tracing paper underneath the pattern so I can actually do a new seam allowance and just add it to the bottom edge I just pinned my tracing paper to the bottom of my pajama pant leg and you can see I just added on the seam allowance and just like I did before instead of following the pant leg and going at an angle I'm just trying to go straight down this is going to make it easier from when we're trying to pin the top of our cuff to the bottom of our pant legs that our seams are going to match up and everything's going to be the same once you have all your fabric pieces cut out you can then start with the assembly now I'm just going to show you how to do this with one pant leg but you're going to want to do the same thing for both so I'm looking at the bottom of my pant leg so this isn't the cuff piece this is the actual pant leg and again mine is front and back together so that's why it looks so big I'm going to start prepping and order to put in my piping and the same so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up whatever my seam allowance is so in my case 5/8 of an inch and I'm gonna do a basting stitch across to mark where I'm going to be placing my piping with the basting stitch you don't have to worry about doing any back stitching you're just doing the longest stitch on your machine and this is going to help us with placement I'm going to take my piping and I'm going to place it on the right side and I'm going to use the basting stitch that I just created for a guideline so the main part of the piping is going to be going up towards the top of the pants and then the raw edge is going down towards the raw edge at the bottom of the pants here and I'm going to use the basting stitch just to kind of place it so I know where it's going to be and I want to make sure that the actual piping part doesn't end up right on my basting stitch but you have a little bit of the flat part of the bias tape of the piping just on that so we're not so when we stitch this into place we're not stitching on the piping but we're stitching right below it so I'm going to pin this all along the bottom eye pants where I have my basting stitch and then we're gonna go back and we're gonna do another basting stitch just to hold the piping into place the black stitch is my basting stitch holding my piping into place so I no longer need pins but the one thing I'm going to do just a prep for when I'm sewing my seams together is I don't want the bulkiness of the piping to kind of get in the way of me creating seams so what I did is from this edge I measured over my seam allowance so 5/8 of an inch I made a mark then I remove the basting stitch so if I had my black base it should go all the way to the end I've just removed three stitches here and I also remove the basting stitch that's on my piping I'm gonna open up this end I'm gonna pull out just the cording and I'm going to trim it off so that you're keeping the bias tape but it's going to lay flat instead of having piping in there and that'll make it a little bit less bulky in the seam allowance area and I'm gonna do it for both ends once that's done I can go ahead and finish off my black basting stitch here just to hold it into place I now want to attach my cuff to the bottom of my pants so remember this piece I place it on the fold here so I have a folded edge I'm going to unfold it line up one of my raw edges so my long raw edges here at the bottom of the pants and I'm going to pin it into place make sure that you place these right side to right side when sewing with piping I like to switch to my zipper foot so I can get as close to the piping as possible when I'm sewing it and I can actually fill it with my finger right here so it's going right up against the edge of the foot there and I'm also using my stick my stitches as sort of a guideline as well so my basting stitches can tell me exactly where that is and I'm just doing a regular seam here so I was gonna follow my pattern which is five eighths of an inch seam allowance and just sew from one end to the other take your seam allowance and press it so it's going down towards the cuff I'm going to flip this over so we look at the right side of it and you're going to do a top stitch right along the edge of the top of the cuff so it's going right up next to that piping again because the stitch is going to show on the right side I'm gonna go ahead and use a matching thread color to my cuff and I'm still using my zipper foot so I can get pretty close to the piping without the foot getting in the way this is just a regular length straight stitch and don't forget to back stitch with the cuff now attach to the bottom of our pant leg we're dealing with a single piece like we were at the beginning with our pattern so now I'm going to continue on with the rest of the construction of my pajama pants so in my case I'm doing the pant leg seam so I'm bringing the two sides together and matching up the raw edges here and make sure you have it right side to right side now the important thing is when you're pinning this you really want to make sure that you're matching up your piping so when you flip it over to the right side it's not going to be skewed and it's gonna look perfect so I really want to make sure that I match that put a pin there match the ends and then match the other side of my pant leg as well once everything is pinned you can go ahead take it to your sewing machine and you're seeing like you would normally so I'm gonna do a 5/8 of an inch seam and you'll notice here I kind of have a little angle I'm gonna follow along with this angle as well when I'm doing my seam press your seams open with it still inside out you're going to take this lower edge your pant leg and you're going to pin it your seam allowance so I'm going to do 5/8 of an inch and after it's all pinned all the way around you're gonna go ahead and press it you're now going to fold the cuff in half so I'm bringing this folded edge up to my stitches here at the seam line so I'm bringing this up like this you can go ahead and remove your straight pins so you can pin it into place like that and I'm going to do this all the way around so it's going to be covering all the seam allowance and it's gonna look really nice on the inside once I have it all pinned I'm gonna go ahead and press it again down here at this bottom edge and then we'll get a little closer to show how I stitch this in a place I'm going to be using a slip stitch and you should use a matching color thread I'm just going to use the contrast and once it's a little bit easier to see so I have my first part coming out on here on the fold line of the cuff I'm just gonna go a little bit above that and grab a little bit of the fabric now you want to make your stitches small and you don't want to go too far into the fabric that you're going to see it on the right side of your pant leg you want this to be as invisible as possible so now I'm on the pant leg part I'm going to grab a little bit of the cuff just going right along the folded edge there and then I'm going to gently pull it so now that I'm on the cuff now I'm going to grab a little bit of the fabric above it and I'm just basically zigzag between the two sides the smaller your stitches are the neater it's going to look so now I'm going to grab a little bit of the cuff and that's it and I'm just going to do this all the way around and then you should be done when you're finished take a look at the right side and see if you see any basting stitches if you do it go ahead and remove those so now our cuff with the piping is complete and you can also apply these same concepts to doing the same thing with sleeves we you enjoyed this tutorial please subscribe to get notified of our weekly releases also check out professorpincushion.com to view our complete library well over 350 sewing tutorials if you would like to directly support us you can check out our patreon campaign and earn some exclusive perks thanks for watching