I've never heard of hem facing. What a nifty trick!Hem Facing Tutorial at Adventures in Dressmaking
"I'd like to share with you how to make a hem facing--or, for my purposes, how to make a skirt longer!
Hem facings are an age-old tool for saving fabric; in the days of long, full skirts, you needed a stiff, sturdy hem to make the skirt stand out for itself, but no one would see the fabric. The hem was sometimes 10" deep from the bottom of the skirt! (I know this because my family does civil war reenacting here in Oregon and I've been wearing 1860's clothes three weekends a summer since I was a kid). There's no reason to use 10" of the dress fabric when no one will see it, and the dress fabric may not be the best for stiffening, so dresses almost always had hem facings or "false hems"--that is, another fabric sewn to the dress fabric at the very bottom, and treated like an extension of the dress..." Read more
Thanks for getting the word out. I've been hemming jeans this way for years, but not before breaking many needles.
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