TUTORIAL: Cropping/hemming clothes

Today I finally got around to tailoring my A Place To Bury Strangers shirt and figured I might as well take some pictures of the process in case anyone else has a shirt that fits them fine apart from being way too long! Or wants to make a crop top, shorts, cutoff sleeves, the technique works for pretty much anything. It's a very simple project, perfect for a beginner.

• The item of clothing you want to adjust.
• A needle and thread in whatever colour you want. Only use a contrasting colour if you know you can sew neatly! A sewing machine would speed this up massively but you really don't need one.
• Lots of sewing pins, safety pins are fine too and I guess you could probably make sewing clips work.
• A ruler.
• Scissors.
• An iron (if you're a perfectionist).

Here's the shirt I'm starting with. Absolutely love it, but I'm tired of having to tuck it into my trousers every time I wear it! Great band by the way >:D The first step is to try it on and mark where you want to crop it to using a pin, a marker, whatever. The ideal length for a shirt is a bit less than halfway between where your belt would sit and your crotch but of course you don't have to obey the rules if you don't want to. Take if off and measure how far up your mark is: Place a row of pins in line with your first mark, using the ruler to measure each one so the bottom will be straight. You want them roughly evenly spaced, the amount you use doesn't really matter but you can use my image as a rough guide. Do both the front and the back: This step is pretty awkward to describe in text... Fold the bottom part inside the shirt right under where the pins are, then one by one take out the pins then put them through the same place they were before, but now through both layers of shirt to secure the fold in place. I recommend trying it on again now to make sure it's the length you want and looks straight but be careful with the pins! Sewing time. This is the long step so put your favourite album or something on and relax for a bit. I'm going to assume you know how to do a running stitch - if you don't, it's easy, look up a tutorial - so do a running stitch all the way along the bottom of the fold: Once you're done sewing, you'll have a flap inside the shirt that probably wants to flop right out. Just cut it off all the way around and you are done! If it's wide enough you should keep the scrap fabric, maybe use it for my patches tutorial ;) This shirt fits me perfect now and it looks neat as well despite my questionable hand sewing, however, to make it neater, I would press the seam down with an iron to stop it curling up over time (I'm not demonstrating this because my iron is covered in melted plastic currently but it's just like ironing the creases out of something). As a final note, most modern clothes are pretty resistant to fraying but if you're working with a fabric that sees a small cut as an opportunity to fully tear itself apart (notably denim) then you want to do a rolled hem or use a whip stitch over the cut part. I can't really be bothered to describe it in any more detail than that but there are tutorials out there.
I hope this was useful and I'm not the only person on here with freakish proportions that require half my shirts to go through this treatment! A fair few of my shirts also need taking in at the sides, so next time I have to do that I will write a follow up blog describing that process as well.