mending jeans

There is so little to show here in the moment. One half of what I am doing is kind of secret (it's the birthday-present for my mom - you will see it in April) and the spring decoration is very incomplete. And then of course I am doing boring things, normally not worth showing. 

Yesterday for example I repaired 5 trousers! Mending jeans I can do all the time, but normally I am waiting until it is really necessary: then there is a pile waiting and the drawers of my kids are empty. 

As I know quite a lot moms with the same problem, I will show you a bit, how I am solving this problem.

Iron on patches are not holding very well or they are very expensive and often they are not pretty. So I recycle the good parts of old trousers for patches. Then you can be as creative as you like to plug the holes. 

This is a pair of my jeans that I decorated with a bunch of flowers from jeans scraps in different colors. Most of the patches are deco, to distract from the necessary ones on the knees:

Sometimes it is possible to stay discrete with the patches. I am often replacing the whole knee area. 

In this case the patches are visible, but as they are on both sides it looks like it should be like that. The patch on the photo below is nearly not visible, it could be a part of the jeans style. There has been some red seams on the rest of the jeans anyway and I made some visible red seams on the patch as well to match. 

I like the style of cargo-trousers with all this pockets everywhere on the legs. You can re-use old jeans pockets and put them over the holes, no matter where they are. The best it is looking if they are a little out of the middle and over the side seam, but even over the knees it's not looking like an ordinary patch.

If it is not possible to cover the hole nicely, I like to make the patch a point of interest. This is my masterpiece:

The town was growing slowly. I started with the two high towers and the dark blue house on the right knee. Then a new hole afforded the house on the left knee and later I had to add the house with the green roof to the right knee. This are only the holes my elder son made, the trouser is now waiting for the younger one. I wonder what I have to add then ...

As I am mostly repairing boys trousers I can only go for flower patches at my garden jeans. I already applicated cars, blood drops, exclamation points, interrogation marks, stars, circles and crosses:

Most of the problems are caused by the position of the patches. In 90% the knees are broken and it is no fun at all, to squeeze a trouser leg under the machine food, having very little space to maneuver. Very often I am sewing the front and the back of the leg together and have to rip everything up again. Or the patch is moving, pleading and crumpling, even if you fix them with needles that are picking constantly in your fingers while moving the fabric under the machine. For those problems I am having two solutions:

1. Glue the patch with fabric glue in place, let it dry and then you can sew around. You can also let the patch without seam, but from my experience even the permanent glue is coming off after a while, especially on highly charged parts like the knee. Also the jeans is fraying out and that is not in all cases wanted.
2. I am opening the outer seam on a length of about 20cm. The most trousers have one leg seam that is covered with two parallel visible seams and one "normal" seam. Open the normal one, because that one you can close later from the inside with whatever threat you have and from the outside no one will see it. With the seam open you have nearly a flat surface to sew on easily. It takes a while to pick up the seam, but fixing the patch is much quicker and stress less.

Still mending is not a preferred task of mine, but it feels good to finish a pile of work in one afternoon. It's like making your tax-declaration. You are pushing it aside a long time, but when you are finally out of excuses and attack it, you feel very satisfied after.

ahh ... I forgot the easiest, easiest way: Make a short out of the trouser :-)

A bientôt,
Jane