What is an open hem on a tarpaulin?
Video length: 2m 00s
An open hem is a simple but really useful feature we fit to a lot of our clear screens. This short video shows what it is and why it helps anchor a screen to the ground.
What the video covers
A standard hem is a 40mm edge with eyelets inserted — the typical finish on a clear screen. An open hem is different: it's left open so you can slide things into it. Along the bottom edge, that lets you feed in something heavy like a chain or a wooden baton to weigh the screen down and keep it anchored to the ground, so it doesn't blow back and forth in the wind.
It's ideal for any screen with a bottom edge resting on the ground that you've no other way of anchoring. We fit open hems to a great many of the screens we make.
Frequently asked questions
How is an open hem different from a standard hem?
A standard 40mm hem has eyelets sewn into it. An open hem is left open as a pocket so you can slide a weight — a chain or baton — inside.
What do I put in an open hem?
Something heavy to anchor the bottom edge, most commonly a chain or a wooden baton.
When should I choose one?
When a screen's bottom edge rests on the ground and there's no other practical way to fix it down against the wind.
Full transcript
I just want to show you another little feature, which is an open hem, which you can see here. Now, a normal hem looks something like this — this here is a standard 40-millimetre hem with eyelets inserted into it, and that is your typical hem on a clear screen like this. But on the bottom here we have what we call an open hem, which allows you to slide things into it.
Now that is particularly useful for the bottom edges of screens like the one we've got here, because it means you can slide something heavy like a chain or a wooden baton into the bottom of the screen, and that's going to keep the screen fairly well anchored to the ground to stop it blowing around in the wind. For example, this just happens to have another wall of a gazebo here which doesn't have any kind of hem other than a standard hem along the bottom of it, and in the wind this would blow back and forth as you can imagine.
So yeah, open hems are ideal for tarpaulins or screens where you've got a bottom edge touching the ground that you've got no other way of anchoring down. This is a bit of an unusual case because it's also got a zip incorporated into it, so we've got a little bit of a gap between the zip and the bottom edge, as you can see. We do offer other anchoring solutions for the bottoms of screens — I'll go into those in another video. So yeah, that's an open hem. That's something we fit to a very large number of screens that we sell. If that's something you require, give us a shout, we can certainly do that for you.
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