Darn It

Over the course of about a week I realized that I had not only weak spots in both of my good pairs of jeans,  but I had holes in both of them as well.

*growl*

I had never heard the term "chub rub" until I saw Daisy over at Add Vodka write it in a recent post. I laughed pretty hard at that one, and it's exactly the cause of the wear in both pairs of jeans. I'm not really ready to let these jeans hit the curb just yet, so I dug out my grandmother's jar of assorted needles and thread colours. She gave it to me before she passed away years ago, and since then I've been able to colour match every item of clothing that has needed repair.

Repairing clothing to make it last longer - frugal.

Repairing jeans that you spent $200+ a pair on? .... Errrr, I'm having a hard time calling that frugal just due to the starting price. Call it bringing things a little closer to reality?

That being said, the one pair is almost 4 years old and is well below the $0.50 per wear point. I'd buy them again given the choice.

Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the only person out there to run into this problem before. I've never been a fan of fabric patches on my clothes, and I certainly don't need to be putting a decorative patch near my butt to camouflage a wear hole. I just want to preserve the fabric so it stays in one piece and looks as close to the rest of the denim as possible.

The first thing I did was pick a thread colour to match the colour of the denim. I'm not a fan of contrast, especially for patch jobs. After figuring out how far the weak spot went in the denim, I back stitched a border around the entire area. This was to serve as a rip stop incase the area let go on me while I was wearing it. It also gave me a defined area to work within.

After encompassing the weak area, I used the same stitch to go back and forth across the hole. You know those threads that are left holding the fabric together in one direction only? I'm stitching them back into a fabric. If your hole looks like the picture to the left, you'd be stitching up and down across the threads. Denim fabric has a rib in it, and I used the existing fabric to space my stitches. Every 2 or 3 ribs I'd do another row of stitching until I'd worked myself from one end of the encompassed area to the other. After that I worked on a diagonal and reinforced some of the really weak areas. The fabric should hold up for a few more months at a minimum. Was it time consuming? Sure it was, but so is working to earn enough money to replace the jeans. 

I got one of the pairs done last night, the other pair will have to wait for another night.