During the month of February, I’m going to try to mend my way through all the ripped and torn, frayed, button-less, broken-zippered, and just plain falling apart items we have. I know I’ve been putting it off. It’s not because I don’t like to do it that the mending basket is overflowing; it’s because I like to sit down with a hot cup of tea, take my time, and do things right. Mending is one of the simplest ways you can stretch your family dollar. The cost to repair an item is usually only a few cents, and the time you spend stitching is an opportunity to travel back in time. You might be surprised at the memories a simple piece of cloth can evoke.
I hope you’ll join me with your own mending basket by your side over the next few weeks as I do my best to make things do.
Day 1:
The Manly-Man brought me his sweat pants today to see if I could fix them. These are the sweats he has to wear for PT (physical training) at work most mornings, and they’ve seen many miles. I’ve repaired one of the ankles before, but it was so long ago that I didn’t even remember until I saw the blue thread in the seam. (Fixing Erik’s work stuff is usually a good opportunity for me to use up odd bits of bobbin thread. Nobody is going to see it, and Erik certainly doesn’t care, as long as it’s not visible from the outside.) These tears are probably from trying to quickly pull the sweats on over size 13 running shoes. It just doesn’t work, honey! I zipped this up quickly on the machine, using an over-edge stitch.
The next repair is a little tricky. It’s a hole that has started to run on the back of the sweats. The hole is about 1/2" wide, and the run is about 2 1/2" long. I’ll do this one by hand. I happen to have some slightly brighter green jersey (aka single knit, or teeshirt fabric) in my stash that I originally got for $1/yard. I’ll only need a tiny scrap for this.
I held the jersey "patch" in place and prick stitched around the edge of the hole. A prick stitch is a bit like a back stitch, but the stitch on the visible side of the fabric is very short, only a thread or two long at most, so it is fairly unnoticeable. In the photo above, I’ve already stitched down the right side of the hole, and I bet you can’t see the stitches.
After stitching the patch in place, I trimmed around leaving about 1/2" allowance.
Jersey doesn’t fray, but in the interest of making this laundry and Marine proof, I folded under the edge of the patch and whip stitched it to the pants. There’s no need to stitch all the way through the fabric, a couple fuzzy loops are enough to keep things in place and still look neat on the outside.
I’ve whip stitched all around the patch, and secured my thread ends with a knot.
Next I’ll stitch through the loops of the run, to make sure the run won’t "run" any further. I’m not sure you can see it here, but this run is comprised of three rows. The top row runs from the hole, to the end of the run. The middle row goes from the hole to just a little past the mid point of the run, and the bottom row is only about 1/4 the total length of the damage. At the farthest right point of each of these rows of running stitches, I’ll take a stitch right through the loops where the fabric is still good. This stitch has to be in the same row as the running stitches in order to check the run.
I’ve stitched the patch to the pants. Now it’s time to stitch the hole to the patch. I don’t want anything to catch on the hole and make it bigger, so I’m whip stitching it to the patch all the way around. This will hopefully keep dirt and filth from accumulating in the space between pants and patch.
And there you have it. A fairly invisible, but quite secure patch. I know the green is a little bright, but I think it will tone down after a few washings. If it’s still noticeably different in a week or two, I’ll try coloring it a little with a permanent marker. That ought to do the trick.
