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| Image credit: Creative Commons |
The other day, I noticed that the inner thigh area of my jeans was getting rather worn. Being the slightly eccentric person I am, I decided to try and mend it. I looked up a few instructional videos on YouTube, found one I liked, and set to work.
This is the video that I irresponsibly deviated from when I mended my pants.
See how pretty and symmetrical her patch is?
Mine is not.
Whereas the lady in the video has managed to sew this beautiful patch in a near-perfect circle, mine looks more like Frankenstein got drunk, and instead of making and animating a monster out of dead body parts, he decided to try and fix his pants.
Which, hey, Halloween is coming up, so I guess that fits!
The first thing I did was to cut out the offending worn denim on either side of the seem down the middle. I tried to do what the lady in the video did and use an embroidery hoop as a stencil to guide my cuts, but it turns out that chunky children's sidewalk chalk makes lines that are really hard to follow (I didn't have any sewing chalk, and I momentarily forgot that a thin bar of soap works just as well).
I then took the threadbare pieces of denim and sewed them onto not-threadbare denim from a pair of sacrificial jeans from the scrap pile. I used the machine for this.
Unfortunately, someone (probably of the short, chubby, and cute variety) decided to mess with the tension controls on my sewing machine, and the resulting stitches on the first patch were...wonky.
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| Photo from slightly further along in the process, but you can see the weird stitches pretty clearly |
The bobbin thread (that thread on the bottom part of the sewing machine) just kind of loosely looped around the top thread instead of actually forming into stitches. I didn't realize this until after I had sewn the entire patch.
I decided that instead of sitting down with a seam ripper and fiddling with it for an hour, I was going to just fix the machine controls and press on.
That was my first mistake.
The next thing I did was pin the patches in place so that the now-reinforced threadbare denim lined up with the holes I cut from the jeans.
The instructions in the video at this point recommend whip stitching the patch in place by hand, carefully rejoining the fabric to where it had been removed.
I did not do this.
Instead, I chose to try and use the closest thing to a whip stitch on the machine that I could find and sew it that way.
"It'll be fine." I thought. "It'll save time."
This was my second mistake.
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| Kind of hard to see, but the needle is broken in this picture. The thread is holding up the broken off tip, like a bead on a necklace. |
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| Overshot a bit and sewed the leg together over the patch. |
I was wrong. It did not.
I ended up breaking a needle, accidentally sewing the scrunched up legs of the jeans together and to the patch at least twice, having to stop the entire process and rip out the seam each time, and I had to go back and reinforce the seam where I had managed to over or undershoot where the pieces of fabric met each other.
This is more or less what the fabric looked like once I'd stitched it.
And I ended up having to go back and stitch parts of it by hand anyway.
This is what the patches looked like when I was through.
I finished them by turning the jeans inside out and adding a hem to the edges of the patches. I used the machine for this as well, but mercifully, there were no more seams that had to be ripped and redone.
Not nearly as pretty as the lady's in the video, but still more or less functional... I guess.
I've worn these for a day since finishing sewing on them. I can feel the patch with the wonky stitching rubbing against my leg when I walk, and there are already a couple areas where the edges of a patch have become disconnected from the parent denim that I'll probably have to re-sew.
But they're not unwearable, and I do think I learned a few things making them.
The primary one was probably, "hand sew when the directions say to hand sew", but that's ok. I'll take what I can get.
Read this week's Quick Takes Here.
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