Tears:

The hubs’ jeans tend to get washed between injury and repair, so the edges of the tear fray out. My method is this:

• cut out the frayed part
• cut a large patch from matching material (saved from former jeans)
• pin the patch onto the inside of the jeans (much less noticeable)
• zigzag the edge of the hole onto the patch (prevents more fraying)
• stitch with the grain of the fabric, in the ravines, with a somewhat shortened stitch length, in two rounds. First every 6 ravines or so in a large area centered on the hole (you’ll have to stitch across the ribs to get between ravines, but it will be minimally noticeable), and second every other ravine or so in an area that extends only an inch or so from the hole. This secures the patch out into good fabric as well as giving it a very sturdy connection in the weak fabric.
• trim the excess patch fabric from the inside of the jeans.

Hubby’s jeans also tend to get holes just above the bottom hem, and I follow a similar but far less thorough method for those holes.

Wear:

My jeans rub thin, mostly on the inside of the thighs. Weakening of the fabric over a general area means the remaining life is limited, but can still be extended. Here’s this process:

• iron fusible tricot onto the inside of the jeans, covering the worn area and extending well into the good. Tricot is good because it is very light and stretches but still gives you a solid foundation for your stitching.
• stitch the tricot in place (otherwise wear and washing will peel it up) with straight stitching as far out from the worn region as you can stomach. Well-matched thread, short stitches, and stitching with the grain of the fabric will minimize the visibility.
• cover the worn area, into the good again as far as you can stomach (probably not as far as with the straight stitching), with wide zigzag; be more thorough the more worn through it is.

With “as far as you can stomach” don’t be shy! You have to get well into the good fabric and be thorough over the bad or you’ll just have to do it again sooner. Stitching within the worn fabric is a double-edged sword – it holds it but simultaneously perforates it. Getting into the good fabric is a necessary anchor for your stitching and tricot.

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There are plenty of pieces of advice for stretching your budget on the shopping side of things. I shop sales and try to anticipate my seasonal needs; I haven’t had much luck with finding my everyday clothes at thrift stores, but I shop there for dressier and costume pieces. Another tip I’ve seen frequently is to choose pieces that all coordinate with each other. I wear v-neck knit shirts and jeans almost every day of the year, with cardigans on top in the winter, so as long as my sweaters coordinate with a wide variety of colors I already have that covered. My spin on that advice is to also avoid really distinctive, noticeable items that I won’t want to wear more than once a month, lest people think I just wear them all the time and never wash them. Dress clothes get a pass, since I am not going to wear those frequently regardless.

The third prong, after reducing quantity and shopping thriftily, is mending. I’ve been trying to determine the cost/benefit ratios of different mends, and here are my thoughts.

Worth It

darning jeans –
Jeans are expensive and machine-darning them is quick. Tears are easier to fix than wear from rubbing, and the mends last longer, but both are worthwhile. Save fabric from dead jeans for later repairs – my husband has a collection of identical jeans and he gets a lot more mileage out of them since I can patch his knee tears with matching fabric so they still look good enough for work. More on this next weekend.

mending bras –
Up to a point, of course. If the fabric or elastic is worn out, doesn’t have the oomph it should, then it’s time to say goodbye. However, if the strap has torn off the band or the underwire is poking out but the material is still good, it’s certainly worth fixing. Again, bras are expensive and the fixes can be quick.

overdying shirts –
Don’t bleach them, because it will thin the fabric, but blah shirts can be revived for a while with an application of dye in a coordinating color. Darkening the fabric not only makes the shirt feel new, it can help thinning shirts be more opaque.

reattaching underwear elastic –
Sometimes the waistband or leg bindings of underwear come loose from the fabric, and it is a quick matter to reattach them with a zigzag stitch, stretching the fabric and elastic while you stitch.

darning sweaters –
For me, sweaters are worth even more than their purchase price, because I have spent a long time finding the ones in my collection. I can’t wear wool sweaters without irritation, and high quality cotton or acrylic sweaters are hard to find. Even though a good mend on a sweater has to be done by hand, it’s worth the time.

replacing coat zippers –
This is typically not as difficult as you might think, and coats are another expensive item. If you have a puffy multi-layer coat the trick is to baste all the layers together maybe half an inch in from the edge of the zipper tape so they stay aligned while you remove and replace the zipper.

Not Worth It

(of course, this is unless it’s an article of clothing that is special to you)

darning socks –
This is a lot of work and most socks aren’t that expensive. I have fixed a lot of socks, but in the future I will only fix the superfancy ones (such as Smartwool), because the amount of time it takes to darn a cheaper sock is worth much more than the amount of time and money it takes to replace the pair. The mends are difficult to make well, also, and can be very noticeable and not very durable.

mending holes in shirts –
I don’t know how to make a mend on the little pinholes that t-shirts develop over time that is not hard, thick, and very obvious. I live with the pinholes until they are too much; fortunately for me that tends to coincide with the overall death of the shirt. I have once or twice taken care of a pinhole by shortening the shirt so it lay in or below the hem, but of course the shirt has to be long enough to allow that.

Maybe, Maybe

replacing jeans zippers –
If the jeans fit well and have good life left in them, and there isn’t a lot of hardware or excess stitching making the zipper replacement trying, then do it. If the jeans aren’t that great or are on their way out, or the replacement process is going to be a lot of labor, I’ll take a pass.

replacing coat linings –
If you love the coat and it’s in good shape on the outside, this is probably worth the effort. This is a LOT of effort, though, so choose carefully.

replacing PJ pant elastic –
Since pajamas don’t get the kind of wear that, say, pants you wear to work do, the fabric often lasts a lot longer than the elastic. The elastic takes wear from machine drying, but also will simply harden with age and get crackly. The reason this is in the “maybe” category is that there are two ways PJ elastic is typically installed: threading through a casing or stitching flat onto the inside of the waistband (generally with many rows of stitching). In the latter case it is probably not worth the effort (though if you have vaguely matching fabric you can cut off the old waistband and make a new one that does thread the elastic through the casing). In the former case, provided the fabric is still good, it probably is worth the effort.

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I used my entire piece of fabric, selvedge to selvedge, and only cut the belt loop strip off after a few steps (none of my fabrics were much bigger than half a yard, though). This was nearly enough for two pairs of pants (it was 58″ including the selvedges and I needed a usable 60″), and would have been more than enough had I not been on the “lots” end of typical belt loop numbers per pair. Four inches per belt loop is more than enough, even counting a wide unusable selvedge.

Fold the edge of the fabric to the wrong side, if there is one, and press. I just folded over about an inch and eyeballed the straightness. Pin and stitch an eighth of an inch away from the fold. Trim off the folded-over fabric close to the stitching.

Fold your new finished edge to the wrong side of the fabric by exactly an inch. Press, pin, and stitch as before, trimming the bulk of the fabric away this time so you have an inch-wide strip with two finished edges.

Now fold both finished edges to the wrong side of the fabric so they meet in (approximately) the center. This step requires lots of pins, and I like to pin from the smooth side so that I can capture both folds in one swoop. Press well, and stitch twice down the strip, 1/8″ or a bit more away from each outside edge. I did this by centering the strip under my presser foot and stitching with the needle to one side. There’s your strip of belt loops!

There are basically two ways belt loops are applied to pants. Dress pants typically have the bottom end sewn into the waistband seam; they may go downward from there before folding up to reach the top of the waistband with a finished end, which is topstitched on. Jeans typically have belt loops that are finished and topstitched at both ends. I did a little of both, though I didn’t tuck the ends of the belt loops into the waistband seam so I don’t think I benefited from it looks-wise.

For the jeans version you want to add 3/4″ to the desired finished length of your belt loop to determine how long to cut them. Make chalk marks that far apart down your strip and make a medium-width tight zigzag on either side of each mark (well, not outside the outermost marks). Cut on the marks and you have your loops. Now fold each end down by a generous 1/4″ (the allowance is 3/8″ because you will lose a little to the u-turn since these are thick) and baste to hold. Pin the belt loops in your desired locations and topstitch with a tight narrow zigzag along your basting at each end. My sewing machine doesn’t give me any measurement/units for zigzag, but I used the same width for topstitch that I use for the sides of buttonholes, and for the zigzagging previous to cutting, I used a zigzag between the widths I use for sides and ends of buttonholes. Hope that helps. For both I set stitch length to 1.5mm.

For the dress pants version you have two measurements to add. If your desired finished length is more than the width of your waistband (and if it’s not I recommend the jeans style), you have to add the difference. For example, if your waistband was 1.5″ and your desired belt loop length was 2″ you would need to add a half inch at this step, coming to 2.5″. Then you need either 3/8″ for the top turn-down or 3/4″ if you are going to tuck the bottom end into the waistband seam. For our example that would bring the total to either 2 7/8″ or 3 1/4″. Fold down and baste one end of each belt loop as for the jeans. For the less-tidy version, butt the other end against the waistband seam in the desired location, right sides together with the loop extending down the pant leg. Zigzag in place, fold the folded end up to the top of the waistband, and topstitch in place. For the more tidy version, pop open the stitching of the waistband in the vicinity of the loop, tuck it in by 3/8″, re-stitch the waistband, and then fold the loop up as before.

(Incidentally I chose my desired finished length by measuring some jeans belt loops. You can measure the widest belt you would ever want to wear with the pants and then add, say, 3/4 inch for the “nice” version or 1 1/4 inch for the jeans version.)

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But look at that grody symmetry and those heinous sagging shoulders. This dress needed some help.

A probably-unreasonable amount of time later….

Yes! Savory.

What I did:
Installed a strip of gathered tulle into each sleeve cap to puff it up (sewn to the armhole seam allowance facing into the sleeve).
Added large shoulder pads VERY loosely based on Sew Retro Rose’s shoulder-pad-making tutorial. I tacked them at the shoulder seam on each end.
Undid my mother’s hacky size adjustment and replaced it with my own hackier size adjustment.
Re-hemmed it to a slant, losing 7+ inches on one side and keeping it as long as possible on the other.
Added ruffles down one side of the neckline and across to the opposite waist, chosen to point at the top of the hem rather than be semi-parallel to it.

The ruffles don’t hold up to inspection if you look too closely at them – I was running out of time before the night I wanted to wear the dress, so I had to be hacky again. I took three wide strips of crepe-backed satin, folded them lengthwise so the satin was out, pressed, folded the ends in and topstitched, and zig-zagged twice to hold and bind the edge. Then I gathered each about 3/8″ from the edge and secured it with more stitching. I stacked them together starting with the topmost ruffle, seam allowance to the right, then the bottom ruffle (which was slightly wider), seam allowance to the left and barely overlapping the top ruffle, and finally the middle ruffle, seam allowance to the left and mostly overlapping the top ruffle. After they were all together and sewn to the dress, shoulder seam to side seam, I folded the top ruffle over and secured it with hand-stitching.

My original design inspiration was the television series Dynasty, with help from my Bangles albums. I had to buy the makeup for this because I don’t think I’ve worn blush in twenty years. Special thanks to my sister for inspiring the slant hem with her aesthetic advice to try to look like “an unstable stack of geometric shapes” and to my mother for suggesting the ruffles.

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Today I sorted through some hanging shelves in the closet. One stack included a lot of cut and torn denim. When I learned how to darn, I was infatuated with the idea of it. Hand-darning has lost its luster, but for a while (also influenced by the denim repurposing adventures and the book Mend it Better) I had the idea to make a denim mending sampler, and maybe even a denim bag or basket that would feature a variety of mends in the same few bright colors. I believe the following darned tear was destined for the latter project.

It’s mended with all six strands of some bright variegated embroidery floss.

That project is not sticking around; there will always be higher-priority sewing and embroidery. However, I wanted to show it off, because it is quite pretty I think, and it also made me think of this picture:

This is a poor picture of the knee of a pair of my husband’s jeans, posted on my personal blog some 14 months ago but never seen here. I machine-darned this tear by following the grain of the denim, stitching in the ravines except for quick stitches over the wales to get from ravine to ravine. It is perhaps the most invisible mend I’ve ever done (the photo actually makes it more apparent, which is useful for teaching I suppose), and I have an idea to improve it. Here’s the ideal process, where step 2 is the one I failed to do in this mend:

1. Fuse a piece of iron-on tricot to the inside of the knee, large enough to extend into good fabric in all directions (typically a tear happens because the fabric is weak in that area).
2. Secure the white threads by stitching around the interior of the tear in a flattened oval.
3. With a shortened stitch, sew along the grain of the denim about every 3rd ravine, moving between ravines by stitching perpendicular to the grain, and covering the whole weak area, extending the stitching into the good fabric. This secures the tricot and spreads the stress out.
4. Over just the torn part and immediate vicinity, sew as in step 3 but in every ravine (or at least the ones you didn’t stitch in before). This helps prevent fraying and covers a bit more of the white threads.

I don’t anticipate much hand-mending of denim in my future. This mend lasted the remaining life of the jeans and took a quarter of the time hand-darning would have.

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My first try was a safety razor, having repeatedly seen the “life hack” of using one to remove pills. It didn’t work at all. I then turned to my battery-operated sweater shaver, which works much better, but was going to take probably 8 AA batteries to finish the whole thing. After that realization I thought I’d better give the safety razor another try, and grabbed a different brand. That one worked like a charm!

I didn’t take a full “before” picture, but here’s the front cleared by battery and back half hand-shaved.

Some consideration and the testing of yet a third brand of disposable razor has led me to conclude the key is widely-spaced blades. The original razor’s blades were very close together, which for hair is fine, but for large lint balls is not. Now, I did go through a couple of razors as well (my sweater is acrylic; as with all synthetics that probably contributed to speedier dulling of blades than a natural fiber would have), and a bunch of lint roller sheets, but it still seems more environmental than a bunch of batteries, and certainly was more economical.

Here’s a picture comparing the razor that did work to the razor that didn’t. You can hopefully see the difference in blade spacing.

Some tips:

It doesn’t have to be expensive to have widely set blades. I started with some wide, three-bladed Schick product that probably was at the upper end of disposables, but ended with the narrower, two-bladed, and almost certainly much cheaper Bic Silky Touch. It worked just as well (given the limitations of size and number of blades).

You can reduce the quantity of lint roller sheets or lengths of masking tape you use by picking the large tumbleweeds of fluff off by hand. My picture above was before I thought of that.

Shave with the grain. That is, if your sweater has ridges, ribbing, or cables, shave along them rather than across them. You want the blades as smooth against the fabric as possible to avoid gouging the yarn and creating weak spots that could turn into holes. I made an exception to this for the fuzziest part of the sweater, the bottom of the inside back, where shaving with the ridges didn’t seem to accomplish anything.

Be patient, take breaks, and clean the fluff out of your razor regularly. If the razor just stops working even after cleaning, swap it out. It’s less waste than a sweater!

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Oh, and happy birthday to my mama!

1. Our sewing machines had two pedals: one knee and one foot. They were industrial machines that came this way, and I don’t know how easy it would be to retrofit a home sewing machine with such an apparatus, but one pedal lifted the presser foot and one ran the machine. To be honest I don’t remember which was which, but I assume the knee pedal ran the machine since that motion is much less fatiguing over the course of a day than working a foot pedal. Hands-free presser foot manipulation saves a lot of time over the course of a day.

2. We tenderized jeans. Hemming jeans even on an industrial machine presents its challenges, and we kept a mallet in the shop to flatten the seams before sewing. Nowadays I use a Jean-a-ma-jig (there’s a similar tool called a Hump Jumper), which works well, if slowly.

3. We used razor blades instead of seam rippers. They are WAY quicker. You want to make sure you have a sharp one so that it cuts threads without much pressure; that keeps you from accidentally slicing into the garment. Of course you have to use it in a particular way: by pulling the two pieces of fabric apart from each other and slicing the taut threads between. For removing, say, topstitching, a seam ripper is probably still better. You do end up with a lot of loose threads, but they may not matter if the fabric is to be trimmed, and otherwise you can try the lint roller trick (not something we did in the alteration shop. I honestly can’t remember how we dealt with threads).

4. My favorite trick and one I will implement if I ever have a sewing space suited to it (and use my iron enough to warrant it): we had our iron cord hooked up high. I can’t remember whether it was the ceiling or high on the wall, but we had an extension cord, and from the iron the cord went upward before going through a hook and heading back down to the outlet. The cord never gets in the way or hung up on anything, or crumples your fabric by dragging against it. It’s a simple, brilliant move.

Attribution: Razor blade picture by Zephyris via Wikimedia Commons. All others via Pixabay.

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Of course you can simply use them as fabric, as in the t-shirt quilt or this flannel infinity scarf made from PJ pants. A little more specific to the clothing but still really just using it as fabric are the famous t-shirt market bag and the less famous but lovely jeans-leg apron. Scrap Users might be a useful resource for this; the t-shirt quilt link and a few of the links below were on that page before its remodel, inspiring this topic.

Cutting clothing into strips is popular and versatile. T-shirts are a common target, since they are stretchy, but firm when several strips are put together. They’re good for bracelets, headbands, and belts. Here’s a macrame t-shirt bracelet and a braided belt from t-shirt strips. I saw a photo tutorial for making a seat cushion from long, wide strips of fabric (it may have been sheets, but t-shirts would work). I couldn’t track down the original, but it was essentially a large-scale friendship bracelet with the strip ends tied around the posts of the back of the chair. If you have enough clothes you can make a rug, whether that be shag, braided, woven, or knotted.

You could design endless variations on these themes, and I have some links to help you do so: T.J. Potter has my favorite collection of braiding instructions. You may also find macrame, boondoggle, and friendship bracelet resources helpful.

I find it a more interesting challenge, though, to think about using clothing for its characteristics as clothing. You can recombine clothes into Frankenstein’s wardrobe, as in these girls’ shirts (though only one of those fabrics was a shirt originally). I have seen shirts for men made from two or three contrasting shirts cut apart along the same lines and recombined, often with some kind of trim along the new seams, but have been unable to find any online. Simpler versions of that idea can be found in this Two-Face costume, straight-yoked shirt, and heart-yoked shirt, and art smock. For more ideas you could start searching for images of bowling shirts, rockabilly shirts, or colorblock shirts.

Dress shirts have so many distinctive features they are a natural choice for these sorts of projects. Here is a little girl’s dress from man’s dress shirt; the back is the sleeves, opened out and hanging from the cuffs, and the front of the dress is the shirt’s back, so the yoke is a bodice panel. These baby bibs are made from both dress shirts and t-shirts. The cuffs from an adult-size button down shirt can be made into a small wallet. [Her folding instructions are rather vague. I would say, button the cuff, flatten it so the end of the button side is tucked right into a fold near the buttonhole side, pin near the resulting fold at the opposite end, unbutton and sew.] Last but not least, Between the Lines has a guide for making a toiletry bag from a dress shirt (and some linen), using the body of the shirt to line the bag so that the original button front is a button closure at the top of the bag, and adding various features of the shirt to the outside of the bag as pockets and hanging straps. It’s quite lovely and she tries to give all the information you need to adapt it to a different shirt from the one she used.

The distinction of sweaters is the kind of material and the ribbing that typically appears at the cuffs and perhaps at the hem. You can use the sweater body to cover a pillow or sew mittens; with the addition of a cuff you can make a cute wine bottle holder. The sleeves are a natural for leggings and boot socks.

No discussion of repurposing clothing would be complete without jeans. The hems and topstitched seams can be turned into coasters, if you have enough of them. The top portion can be turned into a tote bag (I did this once – scroll down), or just the back side into an apron, with cleverly added pocket. A lunch bag can be made from the leg, and a similar bag could be made with other pants, or even the sleeves of a blazer or coat.

What have you seen that ought to be on this list?

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That sounded like a good place to start. Actually, changing the color sounded like a better place to start – I figured if I ever planned to dye it, it would be better to do so at the beginning. I don’t have a before-before picture, but you can imagine the standard t-shirt heather gray.

To obtain material for the new collar, I shortened the shirt, which helped with fit as well. The plan was to change the collar and then reassess fit before re-hemming the bottom, and as I expected the v-neck helped the fit substantially – so much so that all I did afterward was re-hem. I took 4.25″ off the bottom, in addition to the 1.5″ or so that came off when I removed the hem to make the collar.

For the collar attachment I used a narrow, short zigzag, but I topstitched with a straight stitch. For the hem I dug out my trusty double needle. The end product looks a little boxy on the hanger, but loose and comfortable on me.

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The post on UVFC has several links for each of four possible approaches: altering, decorating, making into a new garment, or making into a non-garment. You’ll see my project (or projects?) here as the month goes on but please feel welcome to play along – even if you’re not local.

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