2y ago

I tried mending on a whim and this is who I am now

I'm grabbing every favourite piece of clothing I have around the house and mending it with a needle and thread

I'm not very good at it, but it's not terribly hard to close up broken seams good enough for some use. It sure as heck beats buying a new pair of jeans for $70 just because I somehow destroy the crotch every year

I'm finding this to be really satisfying and relatively easy to do. Certainly I can develop better stitching technique and use better tools and material, but it's easy enough to be good enough, or so it seems to me now

4 comments

@StudioCaroline@mastodon.social recommended I try "underpatching", where you use some fabric to give the stitch something to hold on to beyond the already compromised material. Some people even do this in overt ways for the look of it. Here's one they shared, OP @ https://mastodon.social/@StudioCaroline/110521864616379151
- This has the fantastic parallel to Kintsugi. I also repair my own clothing like OP, but I just yesterday created a big horizontal tear in a pair of shorts I enjoy wearing and will try repairing them like you've linked here, it looks really nice!
  I also have a rather difficult time finding decent jeans in my correct waist and length, so I've taken to hemming my own pants and while the first time was terrifying (I'm cutting off the bottom of a perfectly good pair of jeans what if I mess up!?) it turned out amazing and I look and feel SUPER confident in the altered pants. So I recoimmend to anyone to give hemming their own clothes a try, maybe starting with a pair of pants that you'll repair like OP's anyway, you can't screw it up much worse anyway!
  
  What style of hemming did you do? Did you create a brand new hem or keep the old hem and attach it further up? I've been afraid to tackle hems on jeans so far.