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
@[email protected] 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
Yeah, you do end up having to do this. I have the exact same problem as OP, in that my crotch desires to rip and tear any pants I wear. Stitching the tear up will only work for so long, get some extra material under there to hold it for a bit longer.
I just did this with some jeans a few days ago. I'm a weirdo and have a hand crank Singer 128 that does a great job on extra thick fabric. I've found that my new singer heavy duty machine can't handle fabric that is very thick.
Oh I'm broke and got a needle, thread, and a complete unwillingness to throw out my pants. Good to know about new singer machines though, I've been thinking about learning how to sew.
That's where I started. Every time I have extra money things get out of hand! I hate seeing a good pair of pants go to waste over a small hole.
Ha! Tell me about it. I got into spinning and I can hardly stop myself. I'm looking down the barrel of dying my own wool now with local trees and 3d printing myself a rigid heddle loom. Fibre arts truly desire your entire soul once you get into it.
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!
This style of embroidery/reinforcement is called sashiko.
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.
I followed this tutorial which cuts the jeans to the proper length and then uses a sewing machine with a zig zag pattern to create the new hem. I had to go this way instead of reusing the original hem because I needed to shorten the leg by 4 inches and would have way too much fabric at the bottom of the leg if I kept the original hem or did one of those non-sewing tricks.
I used a marker to create the lines of interest as described in the video but uh… those lines didn’t wash out. Thankfully they’re hidden unless you really go looking for them but I’d suggest a quick trip to the craft store for tailoring chalk!