What's in the mending pile today?

Vintage jeans

On holiday in Toulouse, I shelled out for a pair of vintage Levi's in the hope that some good sturdy 100% cotton denim would last a little longer before falling apart. My cursory inspection in the shop didn't reveal any significant wear and tear, but the instant I showed them off to my travel companion after purchase, I saw a crotch hole. Since sales are final (and I've long left Toulouse at this point), I have to repair that before wearing. Doing that properly involves unpicking the flat-felled seam at the crotch, patching and darning the whole area, and redoing the seam and topstitching. I don't have any topstitching thread, let alone of the right colour, so this is not going to be exactly invisible mending, but anyone who is close enough to my undercarriage that they can judge the colour of my topstitch is too close.

Note the bar tack at the intersection between the crotch seam and the inseam. I am not unpicking that, so I won't have much maneuvering room and I'll just have to hope that the small holes to either side of this bar tack won't get too big too fast. I might put in a couple of darning stitches by hand...

Fast Fashion Garbage

This pair of jeans is from Zara. It's very comfy and also stylish as heck; I get compliments on it regularly. I also get asked a lot whether the embroidery is my handiwork. It's not, but I did patch the biggest holes with some swatches I knitted, and I'm pretty pleased with that. The little yellow one is from years back, when I wanted to try out brioche, and the bigger sky-blue one is taken from a shirt pattern I knitted last year.

The fabric is pretty mediocre quality, though the elastane seems to have held up so far, and the artificially distressed areas are getting, well, increasingly distressed. The program today is to patch the thinnest areas with some of the flimsier denim fabric from the scrap pile. I won't be too stubborn about mending this pair; when it gets too threadbare (maybe another season from now), I'll cut out the embroidery and appliqué it somewhere else.

I'm cutting some scraps and basting them with a stick of school glue before going for a couple of passes under the sewing machine. I'm keeping the sewing light for a few reasons: it's annoying to do (and I always end up sewing layers together that don't belong together); it gets scratchy to wear; and, again, I'm not being too stubborn with the mending. The patched areas will end up stronger than the surrounding fabric anyway, so there's no point trying to make them extra robust. 

Post-repair update: the thing with the layers happened three times!!!!! average number, honestly. At least I caught it early every time, so it led to minimal unpicking.

Work Backpack

I love this backpack. I bought it new on Vinted; it's a beautiful colour and fairly water-tight. I take it to work everyday. For the second time, a set of zipper teeth have come loose from their surrounding fabric, so I'm going to give them the same treatment as the first time: a little bit of fabric glue to keep them in place, and a few stitches between the teeth and through the inner layer of the fabric, trying not to go through the waterproof layer. The first spot where I did this, a few months ago, seems to be holding up fine.

Until next time...