An important day today. A great one, even. I did it. I was worried whether I’d be able to. After all, doing it myself was something I could never have imagined. How would I even do it? But they explained to us that it was nothing scary and there was no need to be afraid. Everyone who really tries manages it. And yes, lots of people pay for this. The internet is full of ads for services like that. But only idiots would pay for something you can perfectly well do yourself. True, to do it you have to lock yourself in the utility room and spend five minutes there without your pants on, but supposedly it’s worth it. So I finally went for it. I went into the utility room, took off my prison uniform pants, and hemmed them. With a blind hemming stitch in looped stitches. Just like in the textbook. Along the lower edge of the piece, I caught exactly one thread with the needle. Along the upper edge, I inserted the needle precisely into the fold of the turned-up hem. And my stitch density was 3 per 1 cm. It came out absolutely perfect—no tailor shop could hem them this well. These prison trousers were too long for me, and for 10 months I’d been rolling them up. Sometimes inward, sometimes outward. But it’s inconvenient, and it doesn’t look great either. And our teachers’ favorite argument, when they look at the skeptical faces of the inmates while explaining how useful it is to become a seamstress, is this: at least you’ll be able to hem your own pants instead of paying a tailor shop for it. So I put what I’d learned into practice. You should have seen me. The legendary way I held the needle, wrapping the sewing spot around my index finger, instead of sewing like some loser by just jabbing the needle up and down. And I had a knot only at one end of the thread—I was sewing with a single thread, not doubled over like people usually do. I bet you amateurs don’t even understand what I’m writing about. You probably can’t tell a plain seam from an edge stitch. (And that’s great. You don’t need this. Don’t waste your time on nonsense—just get your pants hemmed right there in the store. Apparently there’s even a special machine now that can bang out a whole kilometer of that blind stitch without any trouble 😉)